[Affected]

I seem to remember Saffron and someone else discussing how Gaussian Blur can't really be used to simulate DOF as seen with cameras. Have you tried experimenting with a combination of the fragment filter and blur filters?

[Optical]

actually, yeah... it's really hard to get good results is what i have found though =(

if you find a good combo let me know man!

[Adamantine]

real camera focus blur(or what its called)
makes colors that are brighter larger
and colors that are darker smaller
like in pics with a person and lots of light coming from behind the white kinda of pushes away all the dark elements, uhh yeah prolly sounds real weird...
so if you have a little bright spot, if you put it lots out of focus its going to get much larger...

the maximum and minimum filter(filters/other) does that, makes bright pixels larger and vice versa with the minimum filter...

and the fact that the longer from the focuspoint the object is the more its blurred, so you would need lots of layers where you blur the image more and less with every layer, and try using the maximum filter in some way...

i've tried doing that to some pics, i'll try to dig some up later...

anyway if you really want real camera blur and got lots of money there are programs that simulate that...they either take the alphachannel in the picture and blurs the pic more or less or uses depthinformation for it(some plugin for 3dsmax does that i think)

[Affected]

... I'd forgotten all abou that filter...
Anyway, it was just a thought.

[sfr]

Thanks a lot for the ideas guys!
Here are some tests I just did in 2 mins:

original image: http://www.saunalahti.fi/saffron/work/beetle09.jpg
5-pixel gaussian: http://www.saunalahti.fi/saffron/beetle09-gblur.jpg
fake camera blur: http://www.saunalahti.fi/saffron/beetle09-fakedof.jpg

I did the fake DOF with a combination of the maximum filter and median noise, and it does look better than I expected (though still far from perfect of course). The advantage of this technique is that the sharp-edged bright areas go on a separate layer on top of the regularly gaussianblurred image, so you get full control on how much you want them to show. I'll have to record this as an action... (if anyone wants, I can post more specific steps for the technique)

Saffron / Sunflower

[Frost]

I for one would be interested. The results are quite good... playing with multiple layers of depth in a pic using this could have some nice results. Thanks Sfr. =)

frost.

[faustgfx]

kai's power tools 5 had a fun little cam focus blur effect style thing, although if i recall right it was more useful for making plain black/white contrasty stuff, no?

could be useful for at least something. or not.

------------------
--
http://www.faustgfx.com
the owls damn sure aren't what they seem.