I’m keen to learn how to render images from sketchup in photoshop. I’ve come across an interesting tutorial on YouTube that shows how to do a night scene:
Making night scene with SketchUp and Photoshop - by Nguyễn Ngọc Phúc
If I can direct you to 0:27 seconds into the video, the chap begins to export the image as a PNG file so that he can bring it into photoshop, however, i noticed that once he does, his image preview and subsequent import into photoshop looks like an actual vector image? how does he do this? I only seem to get rasterised versions?
Could anyone please take a look at the first few minutes of the video and provide me with a clue as to how this black magic works? !!!
I didn’t watch the whole video, but from the part you pointed out it looks like he just exported a large (5000x2418) raster image. That way when he zooms in he still has some pixels to work with.
Thanks MattR, t did notice that, I tried doing the same but when I zoomed about as close as he did my image looks very pixelated by comparison, I’ll try a few options with the image size…
Hi MattR, just an update, I tried it again and lo and behold you were right, I think i must have made a few errors when I tried doing it to the same resolution earlier, I really appreciate your help!
A PNG image is purely a raster file with no possibility of including vector data.
To get a 2D vector file from Sketchup for processing in graphics applications you can use the EPS or PDF export (from SketchUp Pro or LayOut) or print to PDF using a PDF printer while enabling the “use high-accuracy HLR” printing option (“vector printing” on the Mac).
Exported vector image files do not contain any raster-based features like images, material textures, shadows or sketchy edges styles, only lines and flat colour fills.
I had exported my image earlier to layout so that I could apply the vector option and try to import it into photoshop from there, but of course photoshop is a purely raster program! so that wasn’t working and I started to get very confused! - But MattR’s suggestion helped me out a great deal, i think that although i had a large image size, my resolution was set really low so I was still getting very bitty images in Photoshop…
Although Photoshop is just raster, if you do a Place of an EPS file you can scale and position it to enormous sizes if you like. When you commit to the placement the vector is rendered nicely antialiased as if it had been a huge bitmap version.
You can even Place Linked, then later if you want to tweak the model you would export and replace the same named external EPS file, and in Photoshop it would update the rendered layer.
