Hi guys,
I just need a reality check with regards to my render output workflow as I have hit on a couple of snags that might have an easy solution:
I currently have an output path for each render with a 16-bit PSD for the Regular Image and a 16-bit PSD for the Multi-pass Image also. This works fine on the whole with rendering a lot of images. However, the issues I am seeing is when I come to use bloom & glare or lightmix. It's quite common for render not to have the bloom & glare effect applied and I need to go in to the multi-pass file and use the 'lightmix' layer or the 'virtual beauty' layer (if I have them) which have all the post-effects applied. Problem solved(ish)
My issue here is that the lightmix layer doesn't have the de-noise applied so can be quite grainy. I have recently discovered that the virtual beauty pass does have both bloom & glare and de-noising applied which is handy, but feels like a work-around.
Everything mentioned above is frustrating, yet not a huge issue as the virtual beauty pass saves the day. But... if I play around with lightmix in the VFB once the render has completed, I then need to save the image out again. The problem here is the de-noising isn't applied to the resulting image.
I would be interested to know how everyone else handles their output and what workflow & output settings you might use?
If anyone is wondering why I render to 16-bit rather than 32-bit, it's because photoshop has limitations on the editing capabilities of 32-bit images. So I find myself reducing to image to 16-bit for editing anyway. It's a bit annoying as the multi-pass layers only really seem to work 'as expected' in 32-bit and you get a lot more tonal range.
If anyone has a decent 32-bit workflow, I would be happy to hear it (especially if using Photoshop).
Side note: Corona won't save exr images to a server path, I can only save to a local drive. This is limited to exr files as PSD / tga etc save with no issue. 🧐
