Soft, hazy renders
Hera
Posts: 1,960
Hello!
How do one make soft, hazy renders like this one? There's a bloom filter, I assume, but what other settings do I play with?
Post edited by Chohole on
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Personally - postwork.
In render, bloom can help as well
Put the focus of the camera close by, add bloom, don't use denoiser, you'll match this one.
Sometimes it's about putting a bright sunlight almost directly into your face (not the character, I mean your face, like the photographer/lens), put only subtle light to counter the shadow on the subject and voila; magic hour.
Otherwise there's things like volumetric fog, but I personally avoid stuff like that because it's heavy on me computers.
YOu can use the bloom filter, depth of field in the camera, pixel filtering in the render settings (higher is softer), a cube with SSS enabled to create an atmosphere and post work too.
Assuming I don't know diddly squat about PS (which I don't), and I have PSCS2, is this hazy thing something you have to download from somewhere?
And also I don't know anything about cameras except point and shoot. I don't have a clue when ppl talk about changing f stops, and like novastrider says...put the focus of the camera close by. Is that a camera setting, or a literal thing like turn a bright light so it faces you the user? Distant, Spot, Point? Is volumetric fog a product
I had a stroke last year so my memory doesn't let me retain info very well unless it's like do this, then do that, etc. Are there tutorials out there that go step by step for things like this
Edited to add: SSS cube to create an atmo?? Pixel filtering?
I use GIMP, but the same lessons apply as Photoshop. The buttons are just a little different.
Yes, I can understand if people don't want to learn Photoshop or GIMP, but 100% simulating everything during Render time also has a cost to it. Either you learn some shortcuts for PS/GIMP, or you wait for the Render to complete. Personally, I'd rather learn photomanipulation techniques.
There are so many tips online for doing tricks post-render. A "soft focus" tutorial for Photoshop might help here.
Ive tried so many times to make sense out of bloom filter but I dont get it. Other than presets that come with some products, I just stopped using it. Denoiser I find to be confusing as well.
Bloom Filter is real simple, the default setting is just wrong. Bloom Filter Threshold is set on 2.000, which is about 10x too tolerant for your average bloom effect to work and just blows up the scene. :-)
For the average bright day scene Bloom Filter Threshold should be anywhere between 20.000 and 35.000. Lower value means brighter objects more easily give off a light effect (like you'd be walking through heaven), setting it higher means only the very very brightest lightsources and lit objects still give off light (say lamps, glowing eyes and lightsabers). (how TOLERANT BLOOM is of all bright things in a scene)
Bloom Filter Radius is a style choice: do you want big vague colored circles (like a hazy sun shining it's god rays over the scene), or small subtle color glows (like bits of white clothing or lightsabers). These values are often really subtle, so like putting it on either the default 0.050 or something like 0.34 are the ranges in which you should play around. (how big the BLOOM SIZE is from bright things)
Bloom Filter Brightness Scale is also a style choice, but is pretty much between two things: do you want neutral light bloom or strong colored light blooms? Lower values is more hazy, while something like 1.2 or 1.4 is for more powerfull blooms like say lightsabers.(how STRONG the BLOOM interprets the bright things)
Mmmmm lightsabers.
---------------
So when calculating what you want from a scene, think like this:
HAZY SUN LIGHT shining over a sunny scene? That means you need High Tolerance + Big Size + Weak Strength
GLOWING LIGHTSABERS shining in a dark room? The means you need Low Tolerance + Small Size + High Strength
Cool, thanks novastrider. The default is what always threw me off. I would turn it on and wonder how that setting was supposed to look good. People were obviously doing great things with it, I just couldnt figure it out based off of those default settings.
Look in your render settings pane, find filtering and there you will find the pixel filter menu.
The depth of field parameter for the camera makes things fuzzy in the background. It's turned off by default. Bloom doesn't use camera depth like DOF, so I wouldn't even use it.
Thanks guys. I've used PSP for a thousand years to do graphics stuff. I bought PSCS2 at a closeout sale from Office Max almost 20 yr ago. Only thing I've ever used PS for is the brushes. Sad, I know. Never could afford to upgrade either.
Thanks for the tips about bloom and pixel filter. I'll have to try them and see how they work now that I know some good parameters.
Having a little fun with bloom filter.
I use bloom in nearly every render I do now. It just looks better. BTW, bloom is one of those things you can change while the render is going and it will not set the render back to zero. You can also wait until after the render is done (actually, this is the best option since bloom can slow the render down).
Laurie
The look in the image would be easy to achieve in photoshop using layers. Nik collection also has some effects that might be useful for that.
I highly recommend you download topaz studio. It is free: https://topazlabs.com/studio/
I have the regular Nik collection, but this Topazlabs is new to me. Very cool, thx!
Bloom, for me, is still WIP.
For post processing, there is also Krita - https://krita.org/en/download/krita-desktop/
While its designed as a paint program, you can still use it for post work of other kinds.
Wow, those are some amazing images!