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CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – Multi-Pass Rendering
But how can we use these images to manipulate our scene after it’s been rendered? By using an image editing
software such as Photoshop. Photoshop is a very popular program which has established itself as the standard
image editing software. If you don’t own a version of Photoshop you can download a demo version from
their web site. Photoshop can split an image into several layers. These layers can be mixed in various ways
but it would be a lot of work if we had to open each of our images in Photoshop and mix them manually.
CINEMA 4D makes it possible for you to integrate all layers into one file. This function does not work for every
file format, such as JPEG for example. Since we want to work with Photoshop it makes sense that we use
Photoshop’s own format “PSD“ (Photoshop Document).
Set the format to “Photoshop (PSD)“ in the ”Save” window’s “Format” parameter. If you have Photoshop 7.0 or
newer, activate the check box under “Options“ at the bottom right of the window. Render the image.
On your hard drive you will now have a file named “Multi-Pass_scene0015.psd“. Open the file in Photoshop. The
image you just opened looks like the rendered image in CINEMA 4D. Take a look at Photoshop’s layer palette
and you will see our channels, properly named and linked with each other.
The great thing is that we can change the layers in Photoshop and at the same time the channels of our
rendering. Remember the specular light we mentioned at the beginning of the chapter? We think it can be a
little brighter.
Select the “Specular“ layer in Photoshop and call up the “Levels“ function (Image / Adjustments / Levels).
Now you’ve already made the specular light brighter without having to render the image again.