Depth Blur

By simulating depth of field artists can create photo-realistic blurring of foreground and/or background objects around a focus distance.

Overview

Depth blurring is achieved through a non-uniform blurring which is dependent on the distance to the object in the image. The user provides an input image and corresponding depth map for the image. The user can then select the focal distance, or the area where little or no blurring occurs, and a maximum blur size. Based on a pixels distance from the focal distance, a blur size is selected and applied to the pixel.

The advance menu allows the artist to emulate realistic camera parameters including focal length, f-stop, aperture diameter, and filmback width. This gives the artist more control, and provides a method to apply known values to a scene.

Inputs

• Use the primary or secondary input to the depth in the Z-depth, red, green, blue, or alpha channel.
• Blur using simple settings like maximum blur size, or advanced setting that reproduce real camera parameters.
• Choose the focal distance by clicking the pick button and sampling the Z-depth of an image.
• Adjust the brightness weight to allow bright pixels to extend further than dark pixels.
• Invert the normalized depth map to process images where 1.0 is the closest distance.
• Apply a normalization to smooth the output image. When this setting is disabled pixel with a 0.0 alpha are ignored, but some artifacts can appear.
• High quality output can be produced by blending the pixels in a more intelligent but slower way.
• Apply the blur using any of the standard blur kernels, or a user-defined kernel.

Results