Tutorial: Making good quality renders for our competition

[radiance]

I'm a professional retoucher - here's the best technique for removing fireflies in my opinion (This is is less destructive than Despeckle, which is better for removing halftone scans, not specks but it's a dated filter and not as good as other noise reduction filters). Use the Dust and Scratches filter with a high threshold setting. It will leave everything untouched and just zap the fireflies:

Before:
http://grab.by/3QbY

After:
http://grab.by/3Qc1

Obviously that's too noisy for a final image but it was just to show that Dust and Scratches can preserve image detail (low contrast detail)

So you can have relatively grainy images and only remove the fireflies. If you want to remove the grain overall, I recommend the Neat Image Photoshop filter. It's very good and I worked at a film magazine (tons of grainy images) and this was the best of the lot (Noise Ninja is good not as good IMO).

thanks, that indeed looks like a much better technique

Radiance

[nick]

is there a filter or technique you would recommend for removing grain and fireflies in an animation using After Effects ?

[radiance]

is there a filter or technique you would recommend for removing grain and fireflies in an animation using After Effects ?

some people have suggested the neat image tool, it seems to have a version for videos too.
use google and check it out.

Radiance

[r10k]

(Noise Ninja is good not as good IMO).

I completely agree with that, although there are instances where NN will beat Neatimage. Not enough to worry about though

some people have suggested the neat image tool, it seems to have a version for videos too.

If your video's frames are exported as images, you can simply batch the entire lot in one of the pro versions of Neatimage.

[alieneye]

you may use Filters-Noise-Median to remove fireflies instead of Despeckle. It work good on real size image (but add some blur) and perfect with 2x downscaling. in my case it completely remove fireflies. I hope it helps.

[hadouken]

great tips here. I understand everything in Radiance's first post except for the path tracing filter option. Where is that? I only see the filter size under path tracing kernel options- and the lowest that will go is 1.0. Can someone tell me where the filter option is please?

[cperkins]

Works great in GIMP using Filters>Enhance>Despeckle I do more animations than stills so I researched a little and found the Gimp Animation Package (GAP) which allows for batch processing using any of the filter sets, and then some. Here's a link to GAP for GIMP 2.6 + (http://photocomix-resources.deviantart. ... -135464357). You basically open all images in the animation as layers and then apply filter to all layers, then save all layers as individual frames. I forget the exact menu tress I used but if anyone has a problem I'll retrace my steps and post again.

[adamrg7]

does this trick still apply for us using octane v2 or v3. And im using blender. should i be doing this?

also..i have this render that i did and it seems for some reason the best version i did was this one with exposure set to .02 and gamma at 1.4. Then i just turned the power of the lights high enough to have good lighting. And this is the most realistic render ive gotten to date. Why is this? is this normal? should i not be doing this? oh ya and this seems to help clear out noise way faster, i get a better render much faster like this ive noticed on multiple occasions. Once i noticed it created very harsh shadows on the cars though, but im still experimenting why i got harsh shadows with that and not with this particular render that looks so good.

[bepeg4d]

Hi adamrg7,
wow you have found a very old discussion started almost seven years ago
Anyway, yes. The old tricks are always good
About your other questions, my suggestion is to open a new topic in the WIP section with a lot of screenshots to explane your progress and doubts:
viewforum.php?f=6
Happy rendering,
ciao beppe