Orestes HDRI's with stars out of focus

puggonn_1873d69a5e

I've got a bunch of Orestes star domes and am having a ton of trouble trying to get the stars to be bright little in-focus points of light instead of being blurry blobs of light. I'm using depth of field and it really plays havoc when I try to get everything in focus. Am having the same trouble without using depth of field. I've also adjusted the domes sizes and rotations done quite a bit actually and am still having problems, anybody got a suggestion for what I'm doing wrong?

nemesis10

Depth of Field will always make things in the background; that pretty much is its purpose to keep the things up close in focus.  HDRI's are generally not very sharp since they are meant to have the blurring that distance creates; a starfield backdrop might better serve your purpose.

crosswind

You better post a render... Orestes star dome HDRIs with 16K resolution are not bad. Some recommended settings as below:

- Pixel Filter: mitchell
- Pixel Radius: 0.65 - 0.75
- Dome Mode: Finite Box (You may have more Dome related parameters to tweak)
- Environment Lighting Resolution: > 4096
- No Environment Lighting Blur !
- No Bloom Filter !
- No Post Denoiser !
- Add some Environment Tint..
- Finetune DOF

* Example1: Focal Distance - 800, F/Stop - 50
* Example2: Focal Distance - 550, F/Stop - 40
The dome are not that blurry... (Product: Orestes Iray HDRI Skydomes - A Night in August)

PS: These HDRIs cannot be comparable to those HD photos with 200Mil+ pixels even if you render a 16K image...