Hi everyone!

I have just decided to take advantage of the last cheaper day of Artstation Pro, and upgrade my account once again. I figured it was worth trying out the blog feature as it wasn't a thing last time I had a Pro account!

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So today, I am going to write about the importance of value in your work. It's something I'm pretty sure a lot of people here will be aware of, but I really just wanted to test the blog feature out and figured that if it helped someone, then it did good right?

Values are something that can often be messed up, and can ruin a nice render or 2D painting. I always edit my renders in Photoshop after saving them from Marmoset as I find it much easier to control my values in there.

So first, what are values?

Values are basically how light or dark something is, from black to white. But why are values important? Bad values can either make your image too dark, or too washed out. Sometimes, you might aim for a flatter value range if you want a more pastel palette (think Breath of the Wild), but a lot of the time, you will want to have a nice range of values in your work.

Here is an example of one of my renders with bad values:

If you greyscale this, you will notice that nothing really "pops". The values are all at very similar ends of the scale:

The values are kind of like the marked values below (but darker):

However, they really need to be more like this:

By importing the Marmoset render into Photoshop, you can mess around with the Levels and really push the values to make your render pop more (you can also do this within Marmoset itself, depends on your preference):

And in greyscale:

Comparison of the two greyscales:

So be sure to always check your final renders in greyscale to make sure your values are nice!

As a bonus, here are a couple of my notes on painting values:

Hope this helped, and I am glad to get my first blog out there into the world!