Depth of Field—rolling your own

[Gare]

Welles opened a topic that's of personal interest to me, and you might be, too.

It's called depth of field, and it's applicable to both digital photography and synthetic imagery. Richard Roseman, a truly gifted animator (watch his Ford TV ad) has created something called Depth of Field PRO, about $60, it's a plug-in for Photoshop, and the applet makes it easy to create convincing planes of depth in an image, with or without a depth map image.

Depth of Field PRO

A depth map can be written by a lot of 3D apps, such as modo, Vue, and cinema 4D. Like bump maps, pixel brightnesses in a depth map calculate the effect; the depth map drives the filter, pixel for pixel, and yeah, you can edit a depth map to make it more pronounced. Below is an exaggerated depth effect so you can see it. In addition to selective blurring, Mr. Rosenman's filter also can add lens blade artifacting (like hegagon lens blades in older cameras), photometric noise to add verisimilitude to synthetic imagery (and to lessen banding) and something called erosion, similar to blossoming when a brilliant highlight blows out an image area. Erosion's effect is most visible in cinematography when a subject is heavily back-lit; the edges of their silhouette erode into the subject.

And there's even a batch mode; with it you can process still images and then compile them into a video, with perfect, moving depth of field focus.

Vue, C4D, and the other apps can do depth of field, but not like this plug-in. It's a worthy addition to your toolkit if you're into photography and not at all into modeling—you don't need a depth map to use Depth of Field PRO.

There's also a more subtle use of DoF PRO I did:

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over on our Member Showcase.

My Best,

Gary