Minitutorial: Highlights/Values for Materials (Patreon)

So you're painting up an armor set for your elven paladin and getting frustrated. All the textures look off- your wood looks like plastic, your metals are hard to read and full of too much detail, what's the deal? 

Often, the issue with confusing/overrendered materials comes down to value. Having a clear, carefully controlled value range from dark to light is one of the most important parts of rendering form and surface information, especially at the same time.

In the content suggestions post for $10 Patrons, understanding on how paint different materials was a common theme. I'll be doing some explanations on how to tackle specific types of surfaces, but I first wanted to also go a little deeper and point out how controlling your value range and how big your highlights are super important.

After painting these spheres, I colorpicked the brightest and darkest parts of the spheres to show how you can use the brightness value (which in Photoshop and other digital painting tools is on a scale from 1 to 100) to evaluate how well your materials are reading. When you're having problems with rendering surfaces, 90% of the time, the issue is that your values need more subtlety. 

I hope this helps!