Why cycles render is slightly blurry?

It always looks like there is a slight blur in the cycles render. And I dont mean dof. I know how it works. I can also fix this slightly mushy look in Photoshop, but I would love to know why it happens? We are talking like 0.5-1 pixel gausian blur like blur.

Check the ‘Film’ panel under the Render Settings, the default filter is a 1.5 Gaussian, see how changing that goes :slight_smile:

Because there IS a Gaussian filter. As well as a filter on any textures you use. These can be controlled in the film panel, as well as in the nodes for each texture. This isn’t a “Cycles” thing though. Almost every renderer provides post filtering. Cycles uses a slightly different technique that I’ve never seen used elsewhere though, that uses LUTs to prevent additional render time. This gives the advantage of not needing to be able to sample across individual tiles though.

Thank you dudes very much! Will explore the film settings for sure now!

Also anti aliasing in blender can cause this… just putting that out there :stuck_out_tongue:

Is there antialiasing option in Cycles?

Quick study. Dropping film gausian value indeed makes image sharper, but also very ugly. Best solution I know is still to render with default 1.5 and sharpen image slightly later.


Here is link to 100% size image.

Guess my tired old eyes don’t see what’s so “ugly.” Don’t see much difference at all between the five, even at 100% size.

Check out the whiskers for example in 1.5 vs 0.01

You can add a filter node in compositor and choose to sharpen there, and dial it in until you like it - then maybe save that node setup in your default file.