Substance Designer 2.1 Tutorials
Filtering / Levels
Subtitles of the Movie (Substance Designer 2.1 / Filtering / Levels)
Picking up where we left off in the last video, we're going to go ahead and now take a look at Levels. So I'm just going to click here, click the Spacebar and bring in a Levels Node. Now right now because we're dealing with a gray scale input, when we come over here to our Levels Specific Parameters, you're going to see that we can only deal with the Luminance Channel as we can see from the Drop Down List. Now we have two ways that we can interact with this, we have the Histogram, which is what we're looking at now or we can look at the Specific Values. The basic concept here if you've ever worked with a program like Photoshop with the Levels Dialog, then this will be very familiar to you. We have two lines here and these two lines represent Levels In and Levels Out. This top line of Levels In is giving us three keys, we have black, midtone or gamma and white and the bottom keys are black and white. So basically more or less this is going to allow us to change the way that these pixels are mapped. So I'm going to come over here to Levels, double-click that like so, so that we can see what we're up to. And the basic idea here is that these peaks that we're seeing in this graph are telling us how many pixels that we have in this image of that particular value going from pure black to pure white. And basically by moving these keys, we can tell it that we want to rearrange any particular value. So in this particular instance, say that I want this particular shade of gray or anything that's whiter than that to be clamped to pure white, like so. Or I could say that I want anything that's this particular shade of gray or darker to be clamped to pure black like so. I could also choose to change the gamma and the gamma will change the overall brightness or lightness of the image. So I can say okay, I want everything to be lighter or I want everything to be darker. Now likewise, I can also come down here and I can say, well let me go ahead and clamp to white again, like so, those pixels but now what I want to say is, I don't necessarily want to keep that white, I want this to be, say maybe a Specular Map. So what I want to do now is clamp those white values all to a particular shade of gray. So in this particular instance, maybe I want the shade of gray to be somewhere around 50 percent gray like so or maybe I want it to be darker like so. Likewise I could say well maybe I want the blacks to all be a particular shade of gray, so I can move that to say a middle gray like so. And everything that was black before or darker has now been clamped and in this range of grays from that gray to that white. So we can get through these five keys, a very complex combination to remap the gray scale values of this particular image. Now things can become much more complex when we're dealing with color images. Before I do that though, I do want to point out to you one final aspect of this. If we click this Auto Level Button, all it's going to do is it's just going to crop out this area here where we have no pixel data in this image. You can see that we have this little area right here where there was no pixel data, that really doesn't accomplish much in my opinion so I don't use Auto Levels often, but that's the function of it, is basically to make sure that we have the maximum amount of actual detail and contrast in our levels. So now I'm going to go ahead and take a look at why color is so much more complex than gray scale. So I'm going to come over here, I'm going to hit the Spacebar and I'm going to bring a Gradient Map and now that we have a Gradient Map. Now you can see that we're dealing with a Color Input for our levels and you can also see that in addition to our Luminance Channel, we have a Red Channel, a Green Channel, a Blue Channel and a Alpha Channel. And we can change the Levels Values for each of these and you can see we have the same five keys for each individual channel. In addition to that, you can see that we have a Levels in Low, Levels in High, Levels in Mid, Levels Out Low and Levels Out High and we have four sets of sliders for each one. So this can be very, very complex when you're dealing with color. If you're not an expert at dealing with Levels, then I recommend that instead that you try to work with gray scale inputs only for your Levels, so that you keep it somewhat simple for yourself. Now if you are an expert with Levels, then you'll find that you can do an awful lot with these Levels in terms of colorization. So just by moving a few sliders here, you can see that I can get a completely different feel to that image just by changing a few gamma values to get a colorization of that noise.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Substance Designer 2.1 |
| Author: | Jason Maranto |
| SKU: | 34327 |
| ISBN: | 978-1-61866-040-4 |
| Release Date: | 2012-04-09 |
| Duration: | 7.5 hrs / 85 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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