Thanks for sharing your technique. I tried your .blend file and noticed a few things.
The laplace filter is an edge detection filter. It does it’s job by comparing contrast, brightness between the pixels. That is the reason why it also detects the fireflies. However, it does its actual job as well. That means, that you also get white lines along the edges. Therefor, if you compare the unprocessed image and the finale one, you can notice a difference along the edges of the car for example, altough that doesn’t have anything to de with fireflies of course!
That is usually not what you want. Otherwise, the technique seems to do it’s job. If you watch the tutorial, maybe you can find a thing or two to enhance it ;). Always interested in seeing what you come up with!
Laplace doesn’t remove only the brightness points as you can see in blend file with car image. Into mask is taken also noise that is not pure white. Node “Greather/Less Than” will never cover it into a mask.
Laplace also doesn’t take big white areas into mask
Laplace works for images that was saved in file format that didn’t save high energy of fireflies
But your topic is fireflies in specific condition - so for this purpose your technique is of course much better.
Shame that we need this work arround with RGB node, that “Greather Than” node is not enough.
Anyway I finaly saw your video, thanks for that I didn’t know about hi energy of fireflies. Thanks.
(Two Notes to your video - move as less as possible, start with empty file (erasing all unneeded nodes like color balance that is not in this case needed, it helps people focus to the point of topic)
I see. I didn’t think about the overal noise reduction, nice! Have you ever tried it with animation? If so, any problems there? I like the couch btw, really cool ;)!
I didn’t know about hi energy of fireflies. Thanks.