Is there a Exposure, Highlight Burn, Contrast etc... settings in Cycles?

[riyadist (Y.)]

Hi,

Is there an addon or any suggestion for Blender like other render engines in cycles?

How can I achieve this?

[JohnMalcolm1970 (John Malcolm)]

Photographer addon has all that kind of stuff and more

Photographer - Camera Exposure, White Balance, Autofocus, Physical Lights, Bokeh, Render Queue

Hello! I am releasing my first addon for Blender: Photographer! What does it do? Adds Camera Exposure controls and Auto Exposure, per camera Adds Camera White Balance, per camera Adds Focus Plane debug Adds Render resolution, Ratio presets, View Layers, per camera User friendly Lens Tilt and Automatic Tilt for Archviz Adds Autofocus Single and Autofocus Continuous to your camera Control Motion Blur using Shutter speed or Shutter angle Adds Physical Light units and Color temperature (version 3…

[riyadist (Y.)]

what about highlight burn?

[JohnMalcolm1970 (John Malcolm)]

No. It has most settings and features you’d find in a real world camera. Highlight burn looks like it’s to fix overexposed parts of an image in post. Using proper photographic settings would mean you didn’t have any overexposed bits in the first place.

[chafouin]

My add-on will add camera-style Exposure and White balance controls.
Some of the things you are looking for are in the Color Management panel in the Render tab (Tonemapping curve / OCIO, Exposure…), the rest is grading done in compositing using Color Correction, Color Balance and similar nodes.

[csimeon]

Or you can save your image to one of the available 32 bit image “raw” filetypes available from Blender output options (eg .EXR) and use powerful photography tools, like RawTherapee or Nik Efex or Lightroom to do this in post process.

[chafouin]

Do they work with 32 bits images? I think Lightroom and Capture One only work with 16bits for instance. You also don’t have OCIO config support so recreating your tonemapping might be a bit tricky.
I think Affinity Photo is one of the best software in that case, the 32bits image support is much better than Photoshop for instance.

[csimeon]

I use Gimp, the Nik Collection works with 32 bit images, RawTherappee does but I’ve used it very little.
EasyHDR is another program I use and works with 32

[csimeon]

I see you liked my suggestion of rendering out to 32-bits and using photo post-processing tools, I’m curious which tool did you try?
(and a suggestion from viewing your image example, if you have a recent version of Blender -I think 2.9 and above- and Optix GPU - Nvidia GTX 20xx or 30xx, enable Optix and use Viewport Denoising, you will be impressed at the speed and the clarity of the viewport renders, with very low samples, often under 50, for working image previews.)