Compositing

Pass-aware beauty stack. Subtle grade. Delivery-ready outputs.

When to Use

• Final beauty composites from Cycles/Eevee
• Grade, glare, vignette, chromatic subtlety
• Pass recombination (diffuse, glossy, volume, cryptomatte)
• Shot delivery plates

Workflow

Enable passes → Render multilayer EXR (or needed passes)
  → Compositor graph → Grade → FX (glare/fog glow)
  → Output viewer + File Output → Validate exposure

Recommended Passes

Pass	Use
Beauty / Combined	Base
DiffCol / DiffDir / DiffInd	Relight flexibility
GlossDir / GlossCol	Spec control
Volume	Smoke/fire isolation
Cryptomatte Object/Material	Isolations
Mist	Depth grade / fog

Beauty Stack (Default)

Combined
  → Exposure / Color Balance (AgX-aware)
  → Glare (fog glow / streaks sparingly)
  → Lens distortion (subtle)
  → Vignette (subtle)
  → Output

Grade Rules

1. Fix exposure before creative grade
2. Prefer lift/gamma/gain or color balance over crushed curves
3. Keep skin/product hues plausible
4. Match reference stills with side-by-side

Outputs

• OUT_Beauty_[Shot]
• Optional: OUT_Alpha, OUT_CryptoID
• Prefer EXR for archival; PNG/JPEG for review

Constraints

MUST DO

• Grade on view transform–aware pipeline (AgX)
• Keep creative FX reversible in node graph
• Document exposure/look settings

MUST NOT DO

• Crush blacks to hide lighting problems
• Over-glare every bright pixel
• Flatten multilayer to JPEG as only archive

Reference Guide

Topic	Reference	Load When
Pass Stack	references/pass-stack.md	When needed
Grade Presets	references/grade-presets.md	When needed
Delivery Outputs	references/delivery-outputs.md	When needed