AI - A little more detail…
Refining Renders with AI, Layers & Masking
Following on from my previous post, I wanted to dive a little deeper into the details I was able to enhance using layers and selective masking of AI outputs. Each adjustment was created at different denoising levels and then carefully blended in with Photoshop.
At first glance, the improvements might look small—but that’s the point. Those subtle details, like wrinkles in fabric or multi-layered materials, are exactly what’s difficult (and time-consuming) to achieve in a base render. This is where AI feels most useful right now: enhancing the realism with fine touches that would otherwise take hours, days or even weeks to create manually.
Let’s have a look at these examples below;
The first shows the side of the leather sofa, notice how a small change here makes it look so much more realistic
This one shows the pool. Where there was once an error in the render, AI has helped fix this and make it look like ripples in the water.
The background has also been cleaned up, it almost looks noise-free and looks well integrated with the image with softer edges around the trees. This is one of the most useful things I have found. On Daylight images, white edge lines around foliage can often be difficult to fix, this technique makes it easy!
Just a last example, here’s an older render run through SD at denoise level 0.3. There’s just that extra level of detail added that makes it just a bit more believable, most notable here are the fabrics and rug which I think make all the difference. You’ll find the more you do this, certain things like natural fabrics will have a noticeable change whilst others are way more subtle but add just enough.
Now let me show you the RAW outputs from stable diffusion with a denoising level between 0.5 and 0.25 (The further towards 0, the less change in the image). You can see that 0.5 adds the most variation and random details to the image but it’s basically unusable. It distorts geometry and changes textures drastically. This is not what you want in an Arch-Viz image. Maybe the background and trees could be used but that’s about it. 0.25/0.3 adds more subtle details but keeps the main textures and geometry intact. I would advise not going much higher than 0.45 on 95% of the CGIs you output, only on a few occasions will it generate something random that’s actually useful. Not - All these example are done with high-resolution renders of 3k and above which generally gives better results.
Key Takeaway
These refinements may be subtle, but they significantly boost the realism of the final image. That said, AI isn’t a magic button. If the base render has poor composition or major flaws, no amount of post-processing will save it. The input always matters. In the next post I’ll look at people replacement.
Let me know if you would like a video tutorial showing exactly how this is done and I’ll do me best to get this sorted soon.