I’d seen another DAZ Studio user post a black-and-white render on Facebook, saying it had been done in DAZ Studio without postwork. I didn’t ask at the time, but just figured it was done with special b&w textures or the like. I didn’t think much more about it until I saw the promo pictures for the Hi-Drama Iray Lights product for sale in the DAZ store. One of the promo pictures for the product was labeled: “Render in Color or Directly to B&W.” That got my attention. But when I read the product description, it didn’t mention the b&w feature. It said something about there being 2 rendering settings. If not for the promo picture, I’d have completely missed the fact that the product was useful for b&w renders.
Nevertheless, I’ve got my copy now. Using the b&w feature is as easy as locating the appropriate icon in DAZ Studio and double-clicking it. To get back to color rendering, there’s another icon you can double-click for that. That’s the kind of simplicity I like in a product. If you’re a DAZ user and interested in b&w rendering, I highly recommend Hi-Drama Iray Lights.
The below images make use of the Hi-Drama Iray Lights product for both lighting and for the b&w effect. I rendered the same scene three times, with the camera set in different positions, to get an idea of how b&w would look with the figure at different distances. No postwork has been done to any of these images.
Hope you enjoy.
If you are an author and have a story for which any of the above three images would make for a good book cover, let’s talk. I can render the image at a higher resolution suitable for book cover use.
Exceptionally well done! I love that image. Makes me want to pull out my DAZ and try it for myself 🙂
Thanks, Yelle! I was surprised that someone had come up with a tool to do B&W in the first place, and even more pleasantly surprised that it rendered so nicely. The DAZ developer community is making quite nice products for DAZ Studio.
For those who want to try rendering black-and-white images in DAZ Studio without making a special purchase of a product for it, try the following. In the Render Settings tab, under Tone Mapping, scroll down to Saturation and set it to 0.
On the other hand, if you want more colorful renders, you can increase Saturation to slightly above 1. You don’t want to get too carried away and set really high values for Saturation, or you could completely wash out the image. Experiment with it, but I recommend you start out with a value between 1 and 2.