>    Yes, I know, but with focal_blur, HDRI and normals, it is really too
> ugly... there are bright pixels scattered around highlights (the size of
> them depending on the amount of blurring) that you can't avoid even
> using the best settings.


Clipping before focal blur will have a consequence that you may not have
thought of. Have you ever seen pictures of things at night, where there are
lights in the out-of-focus background? Notice that the lights appear like
bright circles; this is because their extreme brightness outweighs the
nearby objects in the area that they blur into. If you clip before blurring,
then this won't happen and the lights won't look as bright as they are.

The proper way to do what you're trying to do, is to first separate the
focal blur from anti-aliasing. They are essentially two different
procedures, but POV-Ray mixes the two because it's convenient and faster to
do them both at once. However, to avoid the ugly effect but keep the effect
I mentioned above, you must do the clipping after focal blur and before
anti-aliasing. This will slow things down as supersampled pixels will have
to have focal blur calculated on them multiple times; but then the results,
which may be very bright, will be clipped before averaging and in the final
result even very bright areas will be nicely anti-aliased.

 - Slime
 [ http://www.slimeland.com/ ]

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