Lens Blur

How is that different from the typical 'soft focus' look ? I can't tell just by looking at the examples really.

jffe

Huh, o.k. After looking at your examples again, the red outdoor scene one seems to just have blurring on the left and right sides, with an unblurred patch right down the center, so if I am seeing that right, then that is masked differently than a standard soft focus effect.

jffe

I'm curious to how you made this one - I've made my own 12 levels variable blur which uses thresholds to ensure that I'm not doing 12x blur but only use a blur component when its needed (roughly). In between the levels it mixes the floor and ceiling blur.

Btw. did you see this one already? http://www.filterforge.com/filters/520.html
My version is not as fast as this one, but its certainly more precise (notice how it looks too blended soft focus alike).

Interesting approach! I'll post mine when I get to the office later today, its completely different.

Here you go - I'm still working on a better max blur control and the 12 levels might be a little overkill - I'm thinking about some sort of quality control that lets you select the no. of blur steps. Notice how the thresholds ensure that a blur component is only active for a given range - this is a very nice feature of the thresholds compared to the blends: the blends always (it seems) fetch both fore- and backgound samples (regardless of opacity), but the threshold only fetches the low and high samples if needed.

EDIT - actually the max blur control will implicitly limit the no. of internal steps, so a low max blur will only use a few blur modules in practice. I tweaked a few minor things and updated the file

Variable Blur.ffxml