Interesting reddit thread here about distressing CG to match plates that has some good tid bits. Here are my take aways.
——-
If the plate has it, a little bit of blur on the highlights in the blue channel, added on top for those bright pings. Always adds a little something and it's not quite the same as chromabb.
——-
Was once compositing a shot with a mix of cg and green screen elements. Couldn’t get it looking meshed. Rendered the cg stuff with a green spill, layered it on a green screen, pulled a key and despill. Boom, finaled.
——-
I sometimes use a Luma key in ae to add heavier noise in the blacks to make it seem like my cg camera sensor is bad in low light.
——-
Filtering! (notch is my personal go-to. Scale up, scale back down). Then soften-sharpen. Throw on some chroma ab, looks real. If you have a beauty rebuild, divide out the albedo, blur and average with itself, the multiply back with your light pass. Gives you a nice color-bleed between different textures.
——-
The last one is a trick i have been doing for years. I also use it when doing product swaps. Basically, once you have the comped product in the frame, make it a smart object, blur it and then sharpen it to match. Really does wonders. Also, duplicate the comped asset and set that layer to softlight and blur it. That can help ”sit” the comped product into the shot. Remove all grain then add grain over everything is good one I use all the time. So much easier with AI denoising as well. I could probably write for days about all these damn tricks I have picked up over the years… lol!
