Painting in Waterfalls - Photoshop Post Production (Patreon)

Hey friends! I just completed this render the other day and am calling it "Lazy River Falls." I wanted to give a little bit of insight on the waterfall design because I often get asked how I do these. This is one I'm just going to describe through a text post since it is fairly straightforward. If you wanted to see a bit more of the behind the scenes editing process, I've linked the Photoshop file to this post (you're going to be surprised how simple this is...)

 In most cases, I like to actually have the waterfall in the scene as an emission plane (just because this drastically simplifies your life and doesn't necessitate having to do any editing in post production with it). Ian Hubert has some great looping waterfall animations he grabbed during a hike somewhere in the PNW. I often tap into these to make my waterfalls; however, they are fairly limited and I often need to string a whole bunch together to get the result I'm going for. So, if I want a larger scale waterfall, I often build it in Photoshop in post production (like I did for this one). 

For this piece, I used two different waterfall images I pulled royalty-free from Unsplash.com:

I then did a bit of kitbashing to add them into the scene. KEY NOTE HERE: in order to have the waterfalls actually blend in well with my scene, I need some rocks or greenery behind them. Looking at these waterfall images as reference you can clearly see some wet, mossy rocks behind. If you just rendered out a piece with an empty sky behind, there wouldn't be enough contrast to allow you to use Photoshop's blend modes to add in the waterfall images to your composite. So, here's what the render looked like straight out of Blender:

I then just masked in the waterfalls and added some mistiness using custom brushes (that I've actually linked in another Patreon post here) to complete the scene. And there ya go! :)

If you read this far, thanks so much for stopping by! If you like these little breakdowns and quick tips, let me know! Hoping to do more stuff like this :D