I am absolutely in love with the look the Thin Film Shader provides, but it feels like being an inflexible beast.
-Is there any way of mixing its effects with the underlying material? The Strength slider in the Filter tab doesn’t seem to do anything. Looks like the only solution is doing multipass rendering and comping later.
-It is too prone to blow reflections out to pure white.
Could someone comment on ways of using this shader effectively?
Hi, Juanxer
Thin Film is an “illuminator” shader. It means that shader tells/informs Camera it takes care about whole shading and all lighting calculation itself (instead of modifying material attributes like other not illuminator shaders do). Illuminator shader is always processed last, no matter where it’s located in textures lists. The standard mixing has no effect for it. Illuminator shader can override almost any material attribute (thus you cannot achieve white specular).
Thank you, that explains a lot of things 
I’d like to know how people handle this shader, then: can its parameters be tweaked to let an object’s conventional material attributes show through in a certain ratio, or is the best strategy multipass rendering?
Hi, Juanxer
No, the shader defines its illuminator status itself, tweaking parameters cannot help without shader’s modification (btw: maybe author of multi-pass shader can help with this )
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