How to improve image crispness?

[Whocares65]

Starting to render some of my own scenes and I'm wondering how to improve image crispness. The following is 1920x1080 at 95% convergence (haven't noticed any changes w/ the image beyond like 75% convergence) and pixel filter set to "Mitchell" w/ radius 1 (which I've read somewhere on the Daz forums should impact image crispness the least) w/ Post Denoiser off, but it still looks "muddy".

There's a distant light pointing to the back of her head and a ghost light off to the top right illuminating her face.

The character and background were rendered separately and composited in post.

The camera has DOF, but the focal distance is right on her face, yet her face is still not as crisp as I'd like.



Compare to this image from BADIK, for example, I'm missing a lot of detail:



The hair, for example, or the skin.

Is this likely to be more of a rendering setting issue or a lighting issue? I don't have enough experience to tell, and while I'll continue to experiment, I'm wondering if someone w/ expertise in this area spots any obvious mistakes or has any suggestions.

 

[Synx]

Well the hair and the eyebrows on your render seems to have a decent amount of detail so my first instinct would be that DIK uses a different skin textures with more details. Your skin looks like the basic DAZ render/skin, while DIK looks to be one with much more detail.

He might be using https://f95zone.to/threads/skin-builder-8-for-genesis-8-female-s.16865/ for the skin. I highly doubt it he makes his own skins for their characters.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

Crispness comes from the quality of your lightning, quality of the mesh, and quality of the materials you use (surface shader settings and textures maps). And a bit of postwork tho. Imo.

Pixel filters are AA algorithms. Mitchell should provide more 'crisp' (rather than the gaussian one) but at the risk of creating more aliasing at low value. That said you should be fine at 1. Looking at the noise middle range in Image A, I would avoid distant light but that's me.

Image A has a better hair shader but quite a bland skin. Barely any details/bump/normal visible. Could be your emissive is too strong and you 'bleached' all subtle details. Facial expression is too caricatural to be credible, which doesn't help.

Image B feels like skin bump was increased and then denoised (bump is quite inconsistant). Or it's just a strong bump with a bad bump map. Hair shader is meh, but maybe had to deal with constraints (they have tendancy to be costly). White point set to a pale yellow tone for blueish contrast.

 

[Whocares65]

On closer inspection, you're right that the skin in the first image is much smoother than the second, which may partially explain the difference in detail.

In general, though, I feel like the images in BADIK have a crispness that I'm not getting. Here's an image from the game:



And my attempt to (mostly) replicate it w/ 99% convergence & Mitchell filtering:



The books and the poster, especially, don't look as crisp.

 

[Andreas Hardcastle]

Seeing you're using Gost Light: Check if "Denoising" is off for that one, there is a one-click script in one of the Ghost Light folders.. I've had some hilarious (not really) effects because of that and it gave all characters this kind of comic style look I see a hint of in your first example.

 

[Whocares65]

Yes, I've turned the denoiser to off. I don't think it has anything to do w/ Ghost Lights per se; it's one of the render settings. Unless you're talking about something else?

 

[Madmanator99]

I don't know his method, but if I want to increase the crispness, I use Levels in Photoshop just a little bit, and sometimes I lower the Hue Saturation if the colors are too bright, but usualy it's not needed as long as I don't go too hard on the Levels.
If you notice, his pictures don't have vibrant/saturated colors like yours, in particular the reds, so maybe he did something similar?

Here is your picture after I apply Levels to it, no Hue Saturation change.

This is the setting I applied, not too strong (excuse my french, but the numbers are what I modified, 0.84 and 210).

Spoiler: Levels setting

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The rest is a combination of what the others said, the lighting is more diffuse in the bedroom picture you rendered, and the textures (and in particular the bump/normal maps and settings) are not detailed/not strong enought in the first picture in the park. Still I like them because of the vibrant colors.

And there is one trick to add more crispness, it's to render at double the resolution you want (so 3840x2160 if you want 1920x1080 as final result), and reduce the size of your picture, the final image will gain in crispness as well. But no need to go to 99% convergence in this case, since you will reduce the size of the image, instead test at different lower convergence %'s.

 

[Synx]

To add to the guy above me you shouldn't increase the size of your render with that much. If you double the amount of pixels you are quadrupling your render time. It's fine if you got a monster of a machine or a seperated render computer, but as most of us don't render time will be your main time skink after the first couple months.

I would stick with going 1 size larger: instead of 1080p (1920*1080) you would render in 1440p (2560*1440). It still roughly doubles your render time but it's atleast not quadrupling it.

As for the post processing it could definitely be uaed. As long as the adjustments are rather simple photoshop has in build batch image processing to apply the adjustments to a large amount of pictures automatically.

 

[HiEv]

The books and the poster, especially, don't look as crisp.

How about this?:


I just ran your image through a sharpen (unsharp mask) filter in GIMP with radius=3.0, amount = 0.5, & threshold = 0.066.

You might simply need to do a little post-processing in an image editor to get the look you're aiming for.

Hope that helps!