Effects Adjustments

All Effects adjustments can be enabled or disabled at once by using the checkbox in the panel header.

Lens Distortion and Dispersion

Simulates the bulging, pinching, and fringing effects of real camera lenses. Both are applied pre-transform, before Glare. Unlike the default Blender Lens Distortion, the Render Raw setup supports transparency. It’s important to note that the 3D View overlays will not be distorted, so the grid or outlines may overlap your objects a bit and it is recommended to turn off overlays when previewing distortion in the viewport.

Glare

Simulates glow around bright pixels. The Bloom effect is a custom implementation that supports transparency, avoids clipping on reflective surfaces, and matches the viewport result with the render result.

Grunge

Simulates specks of dust, dirt, smudges and drops of rain on the front of the lens, with the same model and controls as the Render Raw Camera’s Grunge. Dirt blocks light and casts soft shadows. Dust and smudges scatter light, so they glow near bright sources. Each rain drop is a tiny lens, so it shows a blurry, upside down view of a wide cone of the scene and goes a little darker at its rim, lighting up near bright sources and against the sky. Drops that touch or overlap merge into one, and none is a perfect circle.

Everything is sized from the active camera’s focal length, sensor and f-stop. Wide apertures only dim the frame a little and add a haze. Stopped down, each speck casts a soft shadow or glows with the shape of the aperture, and each drop is a distinct blob with the scene inside it. With Depth of Field off the lens is assumed to be at f/8. The drops only see what is in the frame, so near its edges they show the edge pixels stretched where the camera would show the scene beyond.

Dust, Dirt, Smudges and Rain are how many of each there are, each with the Size of its largest in millimeters. Thickness is how tall the drops are. Flatter drops bend light less and have fainter rims.

Distance is how far in front of the aperture the effect is, in focal lengths, with about 1 to 2 for the front of a lens and 3 to 4 for a filter. Further out, the specks and drops are smaller and more distinct.

Softness scales how much the aperture blurs the specks and drops, for a softer or sharper look without changing the camera’s Depth of Field.

Spread is how widely dust and smudges scatter light.

Quality is the resolution the specks and drops are computed at. Lower is faster and a little softer.

Vignette

Simulates darkening, lightening, or a custom color around the edges of the viewport.

The default settings match the falloff of a real lens, so Factor alone sets the strength. On a full frame camera, a Factor of 0.12 matches an 85mm lens, 0.3 a 50mm, 0.5 a 35mm, and 0.8 a 24mm. The Render Raw Camera has its own lens vignette, so use one or the other.

Linear Blend adjusts how the vignette is mixed with the rendered colors. At 0 it mixes the chosen color on top of the render, post-transform. At 1 it is calculated pre-transform by using addition and multiplication, like a real lens.

Highlights controls whether or not bright areas can be darkened by the vignette. Feathering softens the edge, and at 1 the falloff starts right from the center. Roundness sets the shape: 0 is a rectangle that fits the frame, 0.5 an oval that fits the frame, and 1 a circle.

The transform controls can be used to precisely place the vignette.

Film Grain

Simulates the grain of photographic film, which is very different from render noise.

Grain is applied after the color transform, because that is the only place its response can be defined in terms of what you actually see. Real grain is strongest in the shadows and low midtones and fades toward white, which is the opposite of what most digital grain does.

Strength is a multiplier on the real amount of grain for the film you have chosen, so a value of 1 is the true amount rather than an arbitrary slider position. You can type in values above 1 for a heavier look.

Format and ISO work together the way they do in a real emulsion. Grain is a fixed physical size on the negative, so a smaller format means larger grain relative to the frame: Super 8 is chunky, medium format is almost invisible. Faster film has larger and stronger grain. Because the grain is a fixed size on the negative rather than a fixed number of pixels, it stays the same relative to the frame whatever resolution you render at.

If you want big, obvious grain, reach for a smaller format or a faster film rather than fighting the settings. At 1080p a correctly sized Super 35 grain is barely a pixel across.

Balance tilts the grain toward the shadows or the highlights. At 0 it follows the measured response of color negative film.

Chroma sets how independently the three color layers grain. At 0 they stay in step, at 1 each layer grains on its own the way separate emulsion layers do. Real film sits somewhere in between.

Once the grain is large enough to see, each grain takes a single color, exactly as it does on film. Edges then dissolve into the grain instead of staying perfectly sharp underneath it. Grains are round with gaps between them and several overlap at any one point, the way they do in a real emulsion, which is what keeps large grain from looking harsh. All of this switches on or off automatically based on the size of the grain to keep things as performant as possible.

The Animate option will change the grain pattern on every frame, which looks more believable but is much slower to preview in the viewport.