Sharp edges with lens blur

#1

I’ve been trying to make a DOF effect using lens blur. It’s fine if the background is the one that’s blurred, but if I try to blur foreground elements, they tend to have really sharp outlines. I’ve searched around and found suggestions to precompose the depth map with a solid to get rid of the transparent areas (which my depth maps don’t have anyway), but that didn’t work. Is this an inherent limitation of lens blur or is there any way to fix it or get around it? All RGB layers had been precomposed prior to applying lens blur. Thanks.

#2

I just recently tried using Lens blur with a depth render myself, and I had alot of issues getting it to look right. You might have better luck if you try lenscare. I downloaded the demo and it seemed to give much nicer results and control.

http://www.frischluft.com/lenscare/index.php

#3

Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve been getting the frischluft suggestion a lot, and it does look nice.

I’ve been able to get a somewhat decent result by blurring the depth map a bit and lowering the contrast and it looks like it could do the trick as long as the effect is not too harsh. I’ll see how far this can take me.

#4

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