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

[chafouin]

Use a fixed 6500K value for the white balance during the capture.

Put your HDRI in Blender and start the render.
Calculate the EV of one of the bracketed exposure photo using the EXIF data. Input that value in the Photographer add-on and see if the render brightness matches the reference photo. If not, adjust the exposure of the HDRI in Photoshop or other photo editing software.

[chafouin]

Latest version: 2019/01/9 : 1.2.2.

1.2.2:

• Fixed typo, this is unforgiveable. Thanks tmammela for reporting it.

I’ll now be working on the 2.8 version!

[Shohrukh]

Your add-on is awesome!!!

[chafouin]

Version 2.0.0 for Blender 2.8 is now available. Please read the warnings below!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RElgHDuP77KE6TsG8meRSTi9QasvejZq/view?usp=sharing

• Thanks @joemoehobo for starting porting over to 2.8, thanks @hypersomniac for the viewport update trick.
• Changed context.user_preferences to context.preferences (API change)
• Little cleaning.

Warnings:

• There are still some registration errors for the addon preference, so you can get errors when enabling / disabling / re-enabling the addon during the same Blender session. Ignore the error and click again to enable the addon.
• To avoid breaking the autosave, I re-introduced a “Apply all settings” button. If you changed Resolution, Color management Curves or Depth of Field default blender settings, they will override the Photographer settings. You can use that button to reapply the Photographer settings all at once.
• Both issues were already present in 2.79 so there is no regression there.

[smilebags]

Amazing to see a 2.8 port of this addon, I’ve been meaning to check back here for a while. I’m excited to get my hands on this one again!

[chafouin]

I think it’s pretty unacceptable to break the autosave, so I fixed 2.79 version as well with version 1.2.3.
Same warnings as the 2.8 version, I think it’s not too much of a problem to have to reapply the settings in rare situations.

[robertzaku1]

This is awesome addon. Glad to see this addon in 2.8. I have a question about the functionality of this addon with EEVEE. EEVEE’s Depth of Field and Motion Blur still have got limitations. They are not feature-complete yet. Could this addon solve the problem a bit? Thanks!

[William]

@chafouin

This seems like a great addon - I can help making the UI more compliant with Blender 2.8 (column, sub-panels, presets)

[chafouin]

The add-on is only an interface layer on top of the rendering options that already exist in Blender, so unfortunately, it won’t fix EEVEE’s limitations.
I am personally still working everyday on 2.79 because some add-ons I use haven’t been ported yet, so I’m not fully aware of EEVEE’s limitations at the moment. If you can write them down to me, it would help me understand the issues and how we could work around them, or nag Clement to fix them

[robertzaku1]

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/render/eevee/limitations.html

[artao]

Perhaps this is beyond the scope of this plugin, but what would the chances be of adding lens presets, so you can pick from a variety of real-world lenses, to go along with the other camera settings of being able to pick from a variety of real-world cameras.
I imagine that would automatically set up the focal length and DOF and such.

[chafouin]

It is out of scope in terms of lens visual signature (vignetting, sharpness, distorsion, chromatic abberation, bokeh shape) because these can only be done in compositing at the moment, and even then, I find the compositing tools to be pretty limited (and slooooowwwww). This would also require to do some lens tests and recordings (not all of this information is available online unfortunately).

So it would only be a limit on the Aperture range (like f/2.8-f/22) and a focal length preset (like 50mm, or 24-105mm), and I don’t think it makes much sense to only have that? Or is it just me?

That being said, having a list of different Lens Post-Processes in the Compositor is totally doable. Unfortunately the nodes are bit limited and don’t have a way to manage a list of values from Presets (AFAIK), but you could always append a specific lens node group.

[artao]

Oh well, dang. That’s a shame.
Thanks for the response, and thank’s for the plugin. Good stuff.

[William]

@chafouin

I’ve re-coded your UI to fit better into 2.8:

• Use sub-panels for each section
• Use header toggles
• Use aligned properties

All panels closed:

All panels open:

Here’s the py file:

photographer.py (50.1 KB)

It’s up to you if you want to use this or not, but here it is.

[chafouin]

Looks pretty sweet, I’ll give it a try first and will update it after. Thanks a lot for your help

[William]

Another small update:

I replaced the large White Balance Picker and Reset buttons with more discreet icons in the header:

This makes it possible to pick white balance even when the panel is closed, and takes up a lot less space.

Also changed ‘Resolution Rotation’ to simply ‘Orientation’

Edit: Fixed setshutterspeed location switching place

photographer.py (50.2 KB)

[chafouin]

Version 2.0.1 for Blender 2.8 is now available.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RElgHDuP77KE6TsG8meRSTi9QasvejZq/view?usp=sharing

• UI improvements based on @William 's suggestions, thanks a lot for your help!
• The UI should now be less “jumpy”, enabling or disabling settings instead of hiding them.
• Relevant information is visible even when collapsing panels. I prefer to keep this kind of info visible as I tweak the settings rather than in a different panel.

Let me know what you think!

[dbalex]

Looks like a nice addon! what would make this addon totally awesome is to have the possibillity to link your sun/sky or hdr also per camera. You change your camera and it changes both résolution/aspect ratio and you world or lights settings.

[chafouin]

I would personally recommend doing it using Blender scenes system to keep it consistent with the way Blender works Changing World HDRI per camera wouldn’t be hard, but if you want to use different light rigs, scenes is definitely the right way to do it.

[Carpe]

Hey, I’ve installed the add on. I mightn’t just be able to see the wood for the trees but I can’t seem to find it on the properties panel. I’m on the build that went out on 06/05.