This very short tutorial stems from a comment by a user on my video about exporting renderings with Glare effects on transparent backgrounds. In particular, the user complained that the glares appeared noisy and banded.
Video Transcript
Hello everyone! This very short tutorial stems from a comment by a user on my video about exporting renderings with Glare effects on transparent backgrounds. In particular, the user complained that the glares appeared noisy and banded.
This result is likely due not to the exportation process, but to the quality of the Glare Streaks effect. In fact, if we observe the Compositing result, we notice that the glares can exhibit noise or bands, even if we set it to High Quality and with the maximum number of iterations allowed by the node, namely 5.
Although there's no way to achieve a better quality effect, we can try to improve the result by blurring the glare before applying it to the rendering. This is made possible by setting the Mix parameter value of the Glare node to 1, which allows us to obtain only the Glare effect, not applied to the initial rendering.
This allows us, in general, to modify the glare as desired, for example by increasing or decreasing its intensity using an RGB Curves node.
Regarding noise and bands, we can add a Filter Blur node, in Fast Gaussian mode, increasing the X and Y values until we achieve a satisfactory result.
The output of this node can then be added to the original rendering using a Color Mix node in Add mode, particularly by connecting the original rendering to the first input of Add and the output of Blur to the second input of Add.
Completing the setup are the nodes that allow correctly storing the glares in files with transparency, such as PNG in RGBA mode.
