Fast Bokeh for After Effects

Fast Bokeh is a plug-in for After Effects that creates a smooth Depth of Field bokeh blur using a Depth Map. It’s very fast, handles edges properly and easy to use.

Why Another Lens Blur Plug-in?

Fast Bokeh is different from all the other Lens Blur plug-ins out there because it meets the three following requirements.

1. Very fast and blur radius independent.
2. Handles edges properly.
3. Gaussian blur equivalent quality.

Blur Radius Independent

Fast Bokeh’s performance only depends on the image size, but not the amount of blur applied, so you can expect a near constant render performance.

No Hard Edges

Object boundaries are expanded and edges are handled properly as expected. There are still limits because the plug-in doesn’t have information about occluded objects in the render, but it does a reasonable job in avoiding hard edges and halos as much as possible.

Smooth Fast Blur

This plug-in creates a smooth Guassian-like fast blur. No special aperture shapes or chromatic aberration settings. So it’s consistent across all dynamic color ranges.

32 bit colors

32 bpc is not only supported, but also recommended for best quality.

How Does It Compare To Other Lens Blur Effects?

We recommend you try it yourself, but for reference here is the same scene rendered using AE’s Camera Lens Blur Effect, Frischluft’s LensCare plugin and Fast Bokeh.

• Camera Lens Blur Effect
• Frischluft’s LensCare
• Fast Bokeh

Effect Controls

Go to Effects->Rowbyte->Fast Bokeh to apply the effect.

• Blur Radius: The radius of the blur.
• Depth Map Layer: The layer to use as a Depth Map.
• Invert Depth Map: Invert white and dark pixels in the depth map. By default white pixels are background and dark pixels are foreground.
• Focus Distance: Set the current focus distance of the Depth Map.
• Repeat Edge Pixels: Always leave it on.

Compatibility:

After Effects CS6 and Creative Cloud. Tested with CC 2017, CC 2018, CC 2019. macOS 10.8 and above or Windows 7 and above.

Important Note:

It is recommended to use Depth Maps without Anti-aliasing for best results.

Changelog:

Fast Bokeh 1.0.1
Release Date: Jun 25 2019

• Initial Release.

Installation Instructions

Extract the zip file and put the plugin files in your After Effects Plug-ins folder.