Denoising later, not at render time?

I’ve searched around a bit, but haven’t come up with any search terms that have found me an answer.

I see that with the experimental feature set enabled, I can enable a render layer’s “denoising” pass, and save all of the information used by the denoiser, presumably for later use. I’d assume this means that you can render once, and then feed the results of that render into the denoiser, to try out different denoising settings, without having to re-render each time.

But in the blender interface and on the internet in general, I haven’t found anything suggesting that this is possible. Is it? Is it perhaps a planned feature for the future? It would be really handy to be able to denoise in a separate post-processing step, to more easily experiment without having to completely re-render everything.

If denoise is activated the rendered image gets always denoised during rendering process.
Along with denoise pass active it is possible to manipulate, composite different passes (raw & denoised) after in post.

For your case you should consider different approach.
ie.
Thread: Cycles noise reduction with VapourSynth
Thread: Denoising Addon for Blender: script generator for avisynth or virtualdub

or Innobright’s Altus

Basically / Note
Denoise methods are used on last 5% for the sake of efficiency:
After you reach the optimum (break point), more time-force-power is spent while less improvement-quality is gained.

Ah, so there’s no way to just defer passing a render to the cycles denoiser then? Thanks for the info. :slight_smile: