Frischluft Flair 1.2 - Lenscare 1.4 for Adobe Photoshop

Frischluft Flair 1.2 - Lenscare 1.4 for Adobe Photoshop

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Frischluft Flair

Flair brings 8 high quality effects to Adobe After Effects and Photoshop compatible programs. Among them shine, glow and sparkle effects. Of course with 16bit and multi CPU support.



Amiga Rulez

This effect is an old demo coders effect which has been used plenty in Amiga demos and was also simply called Zoom Rotator. I saw it first in an Amiga 500 demo by Sanity where it's coder Chaos did an incredible job making it realtime in fullscreen. The image shown was just a text saying 'Amiga Rulez' because the demo entered a competition held by Commodore at the World of Amiga 92. Later many extensions to this effect have been made such as making it rotate around 3 axis instead of only one like the original effect.

Unusual settings including shear and white fog. Box Blur



This is a sub pixel accurate Box Blur. It includes an aberrative mode which splits colors as can be seen in the example image. Included is the option to operate the filter with a mask that determines blur on a per pixel base.



Abberative mode with soft mask. Glass Sphere

A shiny glass sphere with lots of options to adjust material, lighting and refraction. Nice for making homepage menu knobs ;) Mosaic Plane



This is an extension of the well known mosaic effect. The mosaic is applied to a virtual plane which can be freely rotated and positioned. Operate it with a mask to alter rotations or size on a per pixel base. Funky?



Glow

The Glow Plugin provides 4 different algorithms to generate fast beautiful glows from a existing footage. All methods work with sub pixel accuracy so there is no popping effect when animating the radius unlike with other glow effects. It's possible to determine which areas are to glow in what intensity. There are various parameters to adjust the effect to your needs including color adjustment, gamma correction, aspect, aspect angle and several blend modes. Highlight



Generates sparkling light streaks from existing footage. Offers the possibility to determine the sparkling areas and their intensities. There are various Parameters to adjust the effect to your needs. Including radius, intensity, color adjustment, gamma correction, streak count, and blend mode. Again this effect is sub pixel accurate for animations.



Radial Blur

This is a fast high quality radial blur. It features a 'aberrative' mode which splits colors. This mode roughly simulates the effect of a camera lens aberrating the incoming light into their spectral components (like in a prism). This effect can be observed at bad cameras and special lenses. Decent usage can add some realism to cg renders.

Radical Blur.



Volumetrics

This one lets you create blazing fast impressive light effects. Volumetrics simulates light passing through your footage. It's possible to determine a per pixel transparency for the light. Two different algorithms are available which basically give the same results but differ in smoothness of the casted light. Though the effect looks very much like true volumetric light it's actually a 2d effect.

There are various parameters to adjust the effect to your needs. Including color adjustment, gamma correction, ray length, radius and several blend modes. Not only compared to the traditional method of generating Volumetric light using a raytracer our solution is blazing fast.



Frischluft Lenscare

Lenscare moves depth of field and out of focus generation to post production. If you need high quality camera blurs with the flexibility of 2d post processing, Lenscare is a great choice. It can get you rid of long extra 3d rendering times. The key aspect during the development of these filters was to match the real thing as good as possible. Lenscare is available as plugins for Adobe After Effects and Photoshop compatible programs.





Depth of Field

Depth of field effects (dof) happen in all real optical devices to a certain extent. It is heavily used in photography and film as a style element. In computer graphics dof is usually generated using ray tracing techniques which increase rendering times considerably. The depth of field plugin generates those fast as a post process. It needs a depth buffer for its calculations.



Out of Focus

'Out of Focus' is a fast version that works without depth information. It creates a blur with constant radius over the complete image and is a good complement to 'Depth of Field'. It offers some extra functionality as well. It's possible to use a custom drawn lens in addition to the generateable ones. 'Out of Focus' also offers background distortion for semi transparent areas.

Fine use of Depth of Field in a fine short:



Dronez

Out of Focus used on live- and cgfootage in the movie Imposter. A cameras blur looks substantially different from what common blur filters look like. Among other differences Lenscare offers these features to help adding realism:



Lens Aperture

A cameras lens aperture greatly defines the look of its blur (Bokeh). Therefore the filters offer the possibility to alter the lens apertures form to simulate several kinds of real cameras. This is important if you want to comp cg elements into real footage or just want your cg shot to fit in with the rest. A wide range of apertures can be simulated. The Out of Focus plugin provides the possibility to completely replace the aperture with a custom image. The aperture's form is most apparent in highlight spots.

Highlights



In reality very bright image parts are predominant when being out off focus (see image below). Unfortunately common graphic formats cut of bright parts. Thus the plugins offer the possibility to select parts that are supposed to be brighter and give those boost.



Background Distortion



This is only available in 'Out of Focus'. When looking through a blurred object the background is distorted due to that object. This effect is not very apparent. But slight distortions help adding to the believability of your comp. To experience this effect try holding your finger in front of your eye so that it is out of focus. Now look through the blurred region on whatever is behind. Move your finger around slightly to see the effect better.

Lenscare offer lots of options to adjust Lens Apertures to match specific looks.

Gaussian and fast blurs can't produce highlights like these. Lenscare can (try rollover).



Subtile background distortions add beliveablility. Especially on moving footage (try rollover). Apart from its speed and quality, an important advantage of a depth of field post filter is that you are able to test various focus settings easily without re-rendering the whole scene. That way you can quickly get an impression what settings work out best for your shots.



Speed

'Out of Focus' effects is a speedy 2d blur and can compete with any existing solution. 'Depth of Field' is very fast for what it does. In a lot of situations you can save hours of render time for just a couple of seconds per frame in post processing. This is a big advantage especially with high quality global illuminated renders. Imagine what you can save on animations. Check out this comparison of Brazils depth of field with Lenscares. (Brazil: 190 minutes vs. Lenscares dof: 6 seconds + 4min no dof Brazil render). Of course Lenscare takes advantage of multiple cpus if present.



Quality

Plenty depth of field and out of focus solutions are available. Fortunately for us most don't simulate camera effects properly. They don't do their names justice because their algorithms are not physically based. They are just methods that look nice in some situations but fail in others. A common mistake for 'depth of field' filters is to 'blur' all the surrounding pixels without regards to their depth values. Usually this results in ugly glow effects in regions with great differences in depth. Here is a comparison of the After Effects standard depth of Field filter compared to Lenscares. The artifacts described above can be seen pretty good in the After Effects version. Please note that the After Effects version was honestly adjusted to look as good as possible. Stochastic or super sampled ray traced blurs suffer from artifacts if not enough samples are used. Lenscare doesn't produce any such artifacts. Of course both filters support 16bit image format. Judge the quality for yourself and take a look at the gallery or download the demo version.