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It would be impossible not to mention film grain among other effects of our

cinematic post-processing chain. the visible silver crystals in the film

negative's emulsion add something very important to the filmic vibe,

so let's try to recreate it. a quick note, we'll use a fairly simplistic method for adding grain only

suitable for static renders, even though there are ways to make animated noise in Blender compositor.

all right we would need the image node with the film gran texture loaded in, you can find

one in the project files... if you hold Ctrl Shift and click on this node you will notice that I

cheated a little bit and this texture resembles a digital noise rather than a film grain, but it

will work just as well for our purposes, so let's connect it to the second socket of the

newly created mix node, set the blending mode to Overlay... it led to some rather weird darkening

of the image and that's because this texture was designed to be used with the linear color space,

that is important to keep in mind, the color spaces of any texture whether it should be srgb or linear

and then basically what we need to do is mix in a teensy bit of that noise, homeopathic dose really.

it could be pretty hard to see, I hope you are able to to notice it through the video

compression. let me zoom it in for you. our digital noise texture imposed over the image helps to

break up a perfect digital look, the straightness of lines, it kind of brings all elements together

by throwing in a layer of entropy on top of it and diluting the digital look just like we have said,

so that is our film grain even though it's not necessarily *filmic* in this particular case. it is

also worth mentioning that the size of the noise can be changed with the help of this scale node.

and I also wanted to mention that we have included some real film

grain textures in the project files like the real deal, so have a look.

that being said, a tiny amount of a good old random noise or Perlin noise gets the job done in this

case. and that is usually one of the finishing touches that I add to the post-processing pipeline

that helps to soften the digital look, even though it's a digital noise (that's paradoxical) :)

next we'll have a look at the output blanking AKA changing

the aspect ratio visually and then we recap the steps that we have taken.

in the realm of cinematic post-processing, changing the aspect ratio to something

white screen is an easy win :) I know it could sound weird but adding the black bars to the

top and bottom of the image or so-called letterboxing the image could make it look

slightly more cinematic right out of the box or let's put it like this... it could be a useful

way to explore different possibilities related to changing the aspect ratio. so let's set up a

box mask, set the width to 1 and the height to something that represents our letter box.

a quick disclaimer, it won't be terribly useful in the case of this image because it was already

widescreen right off the start but other than that it could be very handy to know... so... uh the

box mask goes into the invert node and that goes into the mix factor of our aspect ratio mix

node, then the height parameter in the box mask could be used to calibrate the output blanking.

to avoid any confusion the output blanking is meant for... well... for preview. the aspect ratio of

the final render should be defined in the output tab via adjusting the resolution.

and of course we should also mention that there is no direct link between some aspect ratio and how

cinematic it looks in the end, so when I say that the widescreen aspect ratio is somehow cinematic,

I'm obviously being ironic (even though it's true to some extent) :)

there are some historical connotations of certain aspect ratios like anamorphic format or 4x3 that

was adopted more than 100 years ago originally, but anyway I think it is still very useful

to be able to control the aspect ratio like that in the Blender compositor so here we go!