Why are objects appearing as a "ghostly" image after rendering? I'm fairly new to Blender, but I hope there's a simple solution to this issue.

In Cycles I'm trying to make a composite of (soon-to-be) animated objects and video footage.

I've used nodes to apply transparent and translucent shaders to the four circle meshes (UV unwrapped with textures) and put in a simple cube for comparison's sake. (An emission shader has also been applied to the largest, yellow circle.)

This is the 3D view set to solid shading, with a background image.



Here's the rendered view:



Why is everything so "ghostly" and pale? No shader has been applied to the cube, and the circles appear much dimmer than I need.

Is there a way to fix this? How can I make the circles appear more "solid" without losing the transparency and translucency I need? It would be ideal if it could look more like the preview in the viewport shading,



but I hear the viewport shading result and the final render result are never the same...

Any thoughts?

cycles material


compositor nodes
Try using an Alpha over node instead of an add node:



The add node literally adds the pixel values of one image to the other image. This means that not only will you have both images visible at once, but you could end up with pixels brighter than 1.