PHOTOREALISM FOR VISUAL EFFECTS IN GRADE
Photorealism can be achieved in Grade and vfx. Grading has a stage called TEXTURING where we can recreate the lens artifacts. Whenever a camera shoots a scene, the lens adds a variety of effects to the captured image. Photorealism is learning the causes of photorealistic camera lens, aperture, and film or sensor effects as they happen in real life image capturing. We must learn about the physics of light travel inside a real camera lens and how to apply those effects to our projects. As we learn the mechanics behind each phenomenon, it is necessary to replicate this in Vfx and to some level in Grading too. We must start from where light first enters the camera, through the lens, and follow it all the way to the heart of the camera, where the sensor or in some cases the film, lives. It is necessary to know the “why" behind complex light physics, and how it causes things like lens flares and bokeh effects. Photorealism is understanding reflection, refraction and diffraction and optical issues or aberrations like vignetting, ghosting, lens distortion, depth of field, spherical aberration, astigmatism, chromatic aberration, field curvature, lens flaring, glowing, defocus and film grain. We then take a practical approach to making those effects look realistic rather than putting lens flares on top of everything and making it look amateurish. Photorealism makes a normal looking shot and transforms it into something that looks like it happened in the real world, on the other side of a camera.