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I need to apply grain frequently in my work to clean plates I’ve created, and it needs to match the 6k/4k HDR plates I’ve been provided. I prefer Add Grain to Match Grain, as it’s quicker and more accurate for me to manually set it. Because of the size of the plates, and the lack of GPU acceleration in this plug-in, it’s the main bottleneck in my rendering speed, plus 32-bit would help with color fidelity. Obviously, multiframe rendering would be great, too, but I would at least love GPU acceleration to start!
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There are much better grain effects available from 3rd party developers if you have the budget. The workflow and rendering time savings will pay for Boris FX or Maxon solutions in a few days if you charge industry standard rates for your work.
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Unfortunately, neither one of those grain plugins have the right amount (or any in the case of Boris Continuum) of control over the tonal range of the image. Continuum doesn't allow for any control, whatsoever, of applying the grain according to highlights, midtones or shadows. Renoiser from Maxon doesn't allow for the range that I need in those three areas. Even when I set all three of those ranges to zero, there is still grain in the image, when there should be none. When I set the application setting of highlights, midtones and shadows to zero in the built-in AE plug-in, there is no grain, which is how it SHOULD work.
That's why I was hoping that Adobe would just address the 32-bit issue, at least, with their built-in plugin.
Rick, maybe I'm missing something, but if there is some workaround that you can think of to fix Maxon's Red Giant's Renoiser plug-in, that would be great!
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Actually, I did come up with a workaround with Renoiser - I have to set the grain amount to a much lower number, with the highlight set to zero, and then max out the shadow amount... Not great, but hopefully this will be addressed in a Renoiser update. Setting something to zero should make it so that there is zero grain applied, I would think.
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Try adding a 50% gray solid, add grain, then set the blend mode to overlay and adjust the opacity. I've never had problems matching grain. I usually do it on an adjustment layer or pre-compose the composite, and sometimes I use multiple copies of Continuum to get the highlights and shadows to match up. The most efficient approach depends entirely on the shot I'm trying to match.
If I saw your timeline with the modified properties of the problem layers revealed, I might be able to come up with a more efficient solution. Personally, I never liked Adobe's grain tools, and I rarely use them.
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I've never been a fan of the 50% gray solid method, but I appreciate the suggestion. I was hoping to have a solution other than to have to use three adjustment layers (or the 50% gray solids), and use just one plug-in that recreates the accuracy of what I could get from the built-in Add Grain plug-in - which has more parameters than any other grain plug-in I've encountered. From what I can tell, the Renoiser work-around seems like it will accomplish what I'm looking for, for the time being.