v1.46 Frischluft Lenscare OFX

Give your footage breathtakingly realistic depth of field and focus effects

Frischluft Lenscare OFX moves depth of field and out of focus generation to post-production. If you need high-quality camera blurs with the flexibility of 2d post processing, Lenscare is a great choice. It can get you rid of long extra 3d rendering times. The key aspect during the development of these filters was to match the real thing as well as possible.

Depth of Field

Out of Focus:

General:

Lens Aperture

Highlights

Background distortion

Advantages over other solutions

Speed

Quality

Plenty of depth of field and out-of-focus solutions are available. Fortunately for us, most don’t simulate camera effects properly. They don’t do their names justice because their algorithms are not physically based. They are just methods that look nice in some situations but fail in others. A common mistake for ‘depth of field’ filters is to ‘blur’ all the surrounding pixels without regard to their depth values. Usually, this results in ugly glow effects in regions with great differences in depth. Here is a comparison of the After Effects standard depth of Field filter compared to Lenscares. The artifacts described above can be seen pretty well in the After Effects version. Please note that the After Effects version was honestly adjusted to look as good as possible. Stochastic or super sampled ray traced blurs suffer from artifacts if not enough samples are used. Lenscare doesn’t produce any such artifacts. Of course, both filters support 16bit image format. Judge the quality for yourself and take a look at the gallery or download the demo version.

Issues

There are common unavoidable problems that all post-processing depth of field solutions have. It’s not possible to blur reflections or objects behind transparent objects correctly. This is obvious when you see that the depth buffer can only hold one value per pixel. But the biggest problem is with no doubt the missing information. ‘Depth of Field’ tries to compensate for missing information, but, of course, there are situations when this is not enough. An example to illustrate the problem is a fence in front of the camera that is so much out of focus that it’s hardly noticeable in the resulting image. Now the plugin would have to make up what’s behind that fence completely. Obviously, this is not possible. In such situations, it is recommended to render in layers and apply several blurs.