Hey everyone!
I’m a complete newbie to Blender, still going through bootcamp. 
So I’ve made a simple setup using cycles that I want to save as an image, but whenever I save it, it’s very grainy and super low quality. I don’t know how to up the samples or change the anti-aliasing or resolution (yup, I’m really new!). Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks!
Here’s what my image looks like:
Ok, I figured how to turn up the resolution to 100% and turned up the samples to 100, but it’s still grainy. it takes forever to render on my computer… so I dont want to do it tons of times. so any help would be appreciated. thanks!
I’m not sure how far you are into Blender, but the samples setting can be altered in the Properties panel under the Render tab.
Also, check out the official documentation page on sampling for a couple of techniques to reduce noise in your scene. You may want to try turning off caustics, for example.
Good luck with your Blender adventures, and welcome! (:
100 samples are still very low quality. Rendering is requires a strong machine so don’t be wondered if it takes a lot of time.
Turn up the samples to 500-1000…and wait 
You can change the bounces in the light paths Max to 3 and Min to 0, there You can turn off the caustics too and maybe in the sampling tab playing with the clamp You can get better results. That will help You to have faster results.
Oh, I just remembered this page from the wiki, also. It goes a bit more in-depth regarding techniques for reducing noise. Good luck.
I always throw in Clamps in the settings as well… It has a slight noise reduction too, as least I tell myself that (Noob here too!). I had this issue too, but it is just a matter of amounts of renders (and perhaps the clamps)
Most render will be in the 500-1200 sample range. If you are using glass or glossy materials these require more calculations so you will be looking at 2000 samples or more. For interiors you will also need more like 2000 samples. You don’t really have to mess with the AA stuff.
Click Shift + B and then use your mouse to drag a small square inside of the camera (as you are looking through it) then hit render. This will allow you to render a small spot and see if the image is grainy or not. Personally (and this is just me) I do not like to clamp my renders because it takes some of the brightness out of certain areas of the render. You are basically telling blender that “no place on the render can get brighter than this” and in reality some areas may need that brightness in order to look realistic and vivid.
If you are using an HDRI map make sure you are using multiple importance sampling and set it to the size of your image. This will help reduce allot of the noise that comes with HDRI lighting.
Not sure if it was mentioned here, but are you suer you’re rendering on GPU?
You have to switch to GPU render in user properities and then under render tab…
Don’t know if your still having trouble but what i’ve found is that if you turn on Branched Sampling it will render faster with little to no quality loss, set sampling up to 1000 AA under Render and Preview (this option only shows up on Branched Sampling), It will take on my rig about 5 hours to render(depending upon the number of Vertices/Polys in the scene) so I usually Render at night and the following morning its usually done. ( Using a Dual Core 2.6ghz Core2Duo, 4gb Ram, 500Gb hard drive, and a 256mb Nvidia Quatro 170NVS (on a laptop))
Don’t render whilst you have a live view render as well - that’ll slow it down. Change your 3D view to solid or wireframe before hitting render.
Or, you could use branched path correctly and save even more time?
Don’t mean to necro post but thanks for the link!
