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

Indeed… not sure when it stopped working, I’m investigating.
I’ll release a version 3.7.2 with a couple of stability fixes from 4.0 once I fix the normalize by color.

Thanks for reporting it.

EDIT: Found and fixed, I’ll test the new version a bit more and release tomorrow.

4 Likes

Hi. Your addon is awesome and it is my most used addon. Thank you.
I just saw this, and I read somewhere that version 3+ users can get a discount coupon. How do I get it?

Contact me on Gumroad, BlenderMarket or here by PM with your receipt, I’ll send you a code :slight_smile:

1 Like

Thanks @chafouin ! Will do on Gumroad.

Today I released updates for Photographer 3 and Photographer 4.
Version 3.7.2:

  • Fixed Normalized by Color Luminance function
  • Fixed possible add-on registration issues

Version 4.0.3:

  • Fixed Normalized by Color Luminance function

Now, the bad news: Normalize by Color Luminance has been broken since the version 3.4, I apologize for not noticing it earlier. But I prefer to be transparent and not try to cover my mistake, the reason being that it could affect your scenes. But don’t panic! Here is what Normalize by Color Luminance actually does, and how to fix your scenes if needed.

Short answer:

  • Opening old scenes with the new version won’t affect your renders. The light brightness will only update when changing light properties.
  • If using Normalize by Color Luminance, saturated lights, especially in the reds and blue will be brighter.
  • To maintain the same look you had with previous versions, disable Normalize By Color Luminance (use Alt+Click to affect all selected lights at once).

Long explanation:

Lumen, Candelas and Illuminance are Photometric units, as opposed to Power which is a Radiometric unit.
Radiometric units measure the intensity of a light in terms of pure energy, independently of its wavelength (read: independently of its color).
Photometric units on the other hand represent the intensity of a light in terms of its perceived brightness to the human eye. In fact, the human is not equally sensitive to all wavelengths of visible light, and photometry attempts to compensate for that loss of brightness by weighing the power of an emissive source using a luminous efficiency function: this is the black curve in the image below (to keep it simple, I am ignoring the green stocopic curve, and only considering photopic):

Essentially, what this curve tells you is that the human eye sees green colors (around 560 nm wavelength) brighter than red colors (650 nm) and blue colors (450 nm).

Now, you may understand why Blender decided to only offer Radiometric units to the artist. To be physically correct, you would need to know the wavelength of a light to calculate the proper Photometric intensity of a light. And unless you use a spectral renderer, light colors are defined by RGB values, and not wavelengths.
However, many render engines have decided to completely ignore the luminous efficiency function and still provide user-friendly photometric units, as these are well-documented and easily accessible on the internet. This is why I also decided to add Photometric units to Photographer.

So what about the Normalize by Color Luminance?
Inspired by LuxCore, Photographer gives you the possibility to “simulate” the luminous efficiency. Even if we don’t have wavelengths available, the CIE 1931 XYZ allows us to extract the relative luminance of a color (y) and this luminance turns out to be rather close to the luminous efficiency curve:
image.
What LuxCore and Photographer do is to divide the light intensity by the color luminance, to compensate for the loss of perceived brightness of the red and blue colors.
Is it physically accurate? No, only spectral rendering would be accurate.
Is it worse to weigh the intensity by the Color Luminance than to ignore the luminous efficiency curve entirely? Not really, I believe this gets photometric units closer to what they should be.

Now that you know what it does, it is up to you to decide how to use it. You can disable Normalize by Color Luminance by default in Photographer 4 add-on preferences (keep in mind that default light settings only work for lights added through Lightmixer, or added as Physical Lights from the Add Menu, not Blender vanilla lights). This way you can decide if you want to match other render engines photometric units, at the cost of some relative accuracy.

Cheers,
Fabien

EDIT: E-mails to customers about this update will be sent tomorrow, in case some people wonder.

10 Likes

Hi @chafouin Great news! thanks

I’m wondering if it’s possible to multiply the intensity of a whole group together even if the lamps are not instanced, I think that could be super practical

imagen

Cheers,
Pato.

3 Likes

Good suggestion, I’ll add that.

3 Likes

Hi all,
Would it be possible to add a scroll bar to the camera list?
When working on big projects+animations, the amount of cameras is huge to not say out of control and when the list is big is relly difficult to navigate in the addon.
There is an addon that has a nice way to deal with it (All Material List), I hope the developer don’t mind it :slight_smile:


As you can see besides the scroll bar we can resize the list of the materials as well.

Cheers,
Juan

1 Like

I’ll look into the scrolling list, it shouldn’t be too hard, I just wasn’t aware of it.
For 4.1.0 I also added the possibility to sort Cameras by collections like in the Lightmixer, to help with these long lists.

2 Likes

Would it be possible to implement (sorry for my therminology ignorance) a point exposure?
Just like a phone, where you click on the scene the exposure is focused to that point. I hope it makes sense.

Yes, I got a similar request and it’s planned for 4.2 :slight_smile:

4 Likes

Is it possible to integrate “camera lister” into “photographer”? it’s an addon that simply get the list on viewport by pressing alt+c, I really can’t live without :slight_smile: It also has settings like clipping/resolution/mm which I love to edit in viewport.
The 2 addons were playing good together until latest updates, if I switch a camera from ‘camera lister’ and vignette or bokeh is activated in ‘photographer’ then I will see the box and planes from the second camera because switching from ‘camera lister’ doesn’t send a signal to ‘photographer’.
I figured out it was about time to ask for a merge, thanks a lot for everything.

If you are looking for having the Camera List panel accessible as a floating menu using a shortcut, yes, I can add that in a future release (probably 4.2, otherwise 4.1 will never be done).

4 Likes

Yes! it would be awesome, thank you so much :slight_smile:

Hi @chafouin

I’ll not get tired of saying thanks for this tool!
It’s making the process much easier!

I have an issue now that I’m using the spot lamp from your collection, so in the light mixer I can tweak the light element intensity but I can’t control the light material intensity, meaning I’m working on a day shot and dusk shot and I can’t turn them off (the material part) from the light mixer. The light is linked so makes it even more complicated as I don’t know why I lose the override of the materials.

Another thing, and thanks to that you added setting on the render window, it would be nice to tweak from the photographer tab the color management as is completly related to the exposure and white balance some times, at least on the overall look, so to have a panel to control all related together will be a huge advance, at least the look part of it.

Cheers, Pato.

The material should follow the light intensity, if does work for me on the lamp I tried, maybe send me the name of the lamp so I can have a look. You should be able to turn the emissive off by setting the light intensity to 0.
However it won’t follow the Light Enable setting, it’s a tricky one… The Emissive Mixer will help but you will still have to enable/disable the light and the material separately.

I wish this was something in default Blender, but sure I can add it to Photographer.

Hi, it’s me again :smiley:
Have you considered to use abreviation for some of the terms like DOF and WB?

Oh yes I have, I wanted the Compact UI to change the Panel names to DOF and WB, turns out it can’t be dynamic. I already get a lot of questions of people not finding things, I decided to not introduce abbreviations for now.

3 Likes

I understand and it makes sense of course, if the users have difficulties on finding something a abbreviation will not help.

Hi @chafouin

getting back to the lights (element) + light material is working as your said lower intensity on the light object is decreasing the light material. The problem is as the spots are linked I can only change with +/- sing the intensity steps and it’s quite tricky I would like to just put 0 on the value.

Cheers, Pato