How can I contact you?

• If you bought the add-on on BlenderMarket, you can send messages directly on the platform.

• If you bought the add-on on Gumroad, you can simply reply to receipt email you received.
  You can also find my email address from the Download page

• You can ask your questions on the Blender Artists thread or send me a Private Message there.

Please avoid contacting me on Youtube, Instagram or social networks as I might miss your messages and these platforms are just not made to have proper conversations.

I get an Error when enabling the add-on

• Make sure that the add-on is properly installed. Blender seems to have issues updating the add-on from the interface.

• It's been reported that the Luminar Light addon conflicts with Photographer, you will have to disable it if you want to use Photographer.

• If you are still not able to enable the add-on, please reach out, following the instructions written below.

Is Photographer 6 coming?

There is currently no plan for Photographer 6. Photographer 5 will keep getting Blender compatibility updates and small improvements.
In the event I find new features to develop that would justify a paid upgrade, please remember that I always offer upgrade coupon to only pay for the price difference with the previous version. This is my way to reward early customers who supported the development of the addon.

Do you participate in sales?

Photographer will not participate in sales, I do not want to prey on people's Fear-Of-Missing-Out, and devalue my product at the same occasion.
Instead, I chose to follow Early-bird pricing principles: Photographer price progressively increases when new features are added. This means the earlier you buy it, the cheapest it will be.
Paid upgrades will always be available with coupons to purchase them at the price difference with the previous version.
This is a way to reward early customers who support the development of the addon.

Can I use Photographer with a Render Farm?

Yes, but you will have to install the add-on on all rendering computers. The add-on is required to update animated Photographer settings during animation render.

If you plan to use a render farm that doesn't allow to install your own add-ons, you can always automatically bake animations of the Photographer properties using the Render Queue > Export Render button.

What is Physically Based Rendering?

There is a lot of material online that should answer that question. Here is my little contribution with slides that should give you an overview of the different aspect of Physically Based Rendering, which includes shading, lighting and cameras.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1o-ZUzyZobI3iIl16atrpXDX7Sd3aoy1uAJI6dUjmchU/

What is the difference between Photographer and Lens Sim?

While the two addons offer a couple of similar features, they are not exactly doing the same thing and can still work in synergy.

Lens Sim focuses on recreating real existing lenses and their imperfections using a physically-based raytraced shader that simulates all the glass elements. This can create very realistic results with physical phenomenons that are impossible to render with a regular Blender camera! However, because each sampled pixel needs to go through complex refraction math, this can increase render times a lot, and effects can also be complex to tweak effects accurately.

Photographer takes a more traditional approach with very simple raytracing techniques to create Bokeh shapes and Optical Vignetting (aka swirly bokeh or cat's eye bokeh), and compositing techniques for other lens effects.
The advantage is that these are much faster to render, but also much easier to tweak after the render is done, with artistic friendly controls that allow you to precisely define the amount of sharpness, chromatic aberration, bloom, etc... This is usually the preferred workflow in VFX companies and professional video projects, as this is the best balance between quality, control and speed.

Please note that Photographer also offers a lot more features than Lens Effects, like Physically based Exposure, Light units and Light modal, Render Queue, etc...

Lens Sim may not work with all of Photographer features because it completely changes Blender Cameras and how Focus Distance and Focal Length work.
I am committed to maintain compatibility with Lens Sim as much as possible, feel free to reach out if you find a bug.