One question about - Post Denoiser

[Voxxa]

I’ve been starting to use Post Denoiser in DAZ Studio. I was a bit reluctant at the beginning, since my initial feeling was that it blurred out and somewhat smeared the colors in the image. Much like JPEG does. Anyway, I started out with an image today of a rock band. Had things I’ve gathered from a lot of different sets as stage interior. Managed to put a drummer (G8M), a singer (G3F) and a Bass player (G8M) on the set. The Post denoiser worked beautifully. Decided to add a keyboard player. Then Post Denoiser stopped working and the image was riddled with “fireflies”. Usually, I render in bigger sizes and shrink the image afterwards. I still have to make a run with the Blur Brush in Photoshop after.

Does anyone of you have a solution to it? Or a tip?

I’m enclosing the image I tried to render. I stopped before it was finished though. So please bear that in mind, OK?!

[phezian]

I don’t use denoiser. I prefer to despeckle in photoshop.

Rendering bigger won’t always solve this. Rendering brighter will do moire to solve it (lower exposure value) but then you have to darken in postwork.

[mjc3d]

I don’t use Post Denoiser either. These are my “Currently Used” render settings:

If you can afford it, I would highly recommend you purchase Luminar AI from Skylum. It has hands down the best denoiser I have ever seen. Not to mention it’s AI can fix even the most stupidest of newbie mistakes (not equating your work to that in any way shape or form by the way).

But, I never need to denoise any of my renders because I always use Render Quality and set the convergence quite high (the default is 95% converged which is pretty damn good but I always go for the high nineties. It doesn’t take THAT much extra time.)

It’s just become the primary tool in my belt. Once I let Luminar AI work its charm then I do further post in Affinity Photo.

[Voxxa]

HUUUUGEEE THANKS!!! I’ll look up Luminar AI as soon as I have money. One thing though, when changing the shutter speed the exposure value also changes automatically. Tried to change it according to the picture but it didn’t work.

[mjc3d]

Yes. The EV setting is directly related to the f/stop, ISO, and shutter speed of the rendering camera. You can either use the EV or adjust the shutter, ISO, f/stop, and shutter speed. But not both.

And I probably should have masked that out. Those values are not one-size-fit all. They need to be adjusted for each scene depending on the lighting and the setting individually.

DAZ Studio by default uses an INSANE default EV setting (and f/stop and shutter speed) setting which requires all the lights in a scene to be turned up super bright to compensate for the super fast shutter speed and small aperture.

I wrote a whole post about it here: For the love of all gods tweak your scene’s lights and exposure values!

And I provide a hand guide to the Exposure Values here: Iray Exposure Value Settings

Bottom line is, the first thing you should do when you start any new scene is fix all the goddamn lights in your scene. Guaranteed their luminence levels are way too fucking high. Tamper those suckers down!

Use real world guides to help you. A 40W fluorescent light bulb has about 2500 lumens and about 4500K - 5500K color temperature.

So change all those Iray tube lights in your scene and adjust them like the way they should be.

Then once your lights are all adjusted you’ll find that you can’t see shit in your scene because your default Iray camera isn’t letting hardly any light in so then go in and adjust the EV settings to match the scene. And THEN if you need to adjust the f/stop and shutter speed of the render camera.

And if all this sounds like a pain, well welcome to real world photography.

Sure, cameras have auto-focus and auto-exposure, but no professional photographer uses auto-focus and auto-exposure. You need to get your hands dirty.

But when you get comfortable with these settings then you can use the Render Camera to your advantage and have it work FOR you.

[Voxxa]

WOW! This is literally a GOLD MINE to me. THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! My wife is a hobby photographer and I learn bits and pieces from her, but I haven’t figured out the relation between the settings yet. But this gives me quite a good hint.

Also, when I adjusted the image I sent and was working with, the light went crazily bright!! I used the “Scene only” setting in Environment before. Usually have Dome and Scene, but figured the intended lights would be detter with Scene Only. Still I’m sooo grateful for all the tips I can get. THANKS!

Anyway, here’s the completed work of the image i rendered in 8000 pixels wide. Had to do a run with the Blur brush in Photoshop. This instead of applying Gaussian Blur to the whole thing. I still want some things to be sharp. Mark that this was before I read this post.

[Voxxa]

I have this other question for you, after seeing the Exposure Value Chart. ISO, in the old days was determining the graininess of the film. The darker the environment was, the more ISO you had to have on the film rolls. But the more ISO, the grainier film. Do you have any math calculation, or such, if I would change the ISO? I sometimes use 64, which I remember had the finest “grain”. But this in an attempt to darken the image also. To me there’s a lot of parameters to keep track of, when thinking of this.

[mjc3d]

I don’t think I’ve ever changed the film ISO from the default of 100 tbh (at least not consciously they may have changed and I didn’t realize it).

And that’s what those EV values are based on. ISO 100. So I wouldn’t worry about that.

I wonder how that would even apply with Digital SLR cameras actually since there is no “film”. I have a Nikon DSLR that I frankly haven’t used in over 5 years. LOL

So my answer is … “I don’t know.”

[Voxxa]

Fair enough. When I had a Canon camera it had film and that was in the 90’s. Still ISO 100 is a good measure to start with. There are so much parameters that affect light, so to me it’s hard to discern them. Still I will dive into your tips and see. When applying them on the band, just testing, It was bright as in the nuclear reactor you mentioned. So I have to fiddle around a little. I will probably be back asking you more stuff, so please bear with me…

[mjc3d]

One of the things I can’t stand is when PAs set the lumenence to candlepower or watts. Those aren’t very accurate and there’s not a lot of good guides.

But google “lumen output for a 40 watt incandescent lightbulb” and you’ll get a ton of responses that pretty much all agree with each other (within a close margin). So I always set the lumenence to “lumens” and start there.

It’s just easier for my brain to grasp the difference between 100 lumens and 100,000 lumens as opposed to 10 watts and 1000 watts because there’s a huge difference in power consumed if you’re talking about LED vs mercury vapor vs incandescent.

[Voxxa]

I was going to ask you about HDRI lighting. I use that a lot as well as ghost lights. But as you mentioned you hated HDRI. Still… have any tips on that? (I’m ducking now)

[mjc3d]

A frayed knot.

@Phezian knows a lot more about HDRIs than I do. I do more interior scenes and if I need an exterior scene lit with an HDRI I struggle each and every time. LOL

[Voxxa]

Thanks a lot! You’ve given me a lot to experiment with. I’m thankful for every nudge in the right direction. Perhaps I can post some of the images I’ve managed to do here. Some are nudes, but as one of you guy said, “nudes aren’t porn”, I dare to ask.

[mjc3d]

Nudes are fine and welcome in the #showcase:risque-business or #showcase:risque-men. Porn is even ok, but porn can only go in #the-dungeon. Nudes aren’t welcome in other categories typically (not a hard and fast rule) because some people may be browsing from work or school.

Some categories other than Risque Business allow nudes.

But in all cases, the posts should be tagged #nsfw accordingly so people can filter if they want.

[phezian]

@Voxxa I use HDRI for outdoor scenes only. I have yet to get indoor HDRI to really work - if the model is anywhere but 0,0,0 its wonky.

I’ll also use HDRI to fill windows. But it has to be an HDRI with a low horizon. It all comes down to how tall the photographers tripod was, I think. The HDRI-haven guys HDRI are top notch - often better than the ones you pay for at DAZ.

The biggest problem I see with HDRI is ground level - if anything breaks goes below 0 on the y axis, you need to set ground level to manual and adjust it any anything below -y will become invisible.

[Voxxa]

THANKS!! I’ve used HDRI Haven’s stuff a LOT. Had great variance using the rotate dome dial.

[evilded777]

There were a few moments when I believed that using the tonemapping settings were a good thing. Since most products ignore the existence of these settings and rely almost entirely on setting the light power, I adapted to the market place.

But since I am a Scorpio Rising, I have to complicate things. Rendering to Canvases (one for each light source – sometimes multiple lights in a source for ambient lighting), plus liberal usage of V3Digitimes’ Iray Light Manager Pro makes lighting fun and not a chore.

[Voxxa]

Thanks, will take that into serious consideration.