Crummy Camera Lens Blur CS6

[Guest]

The Camera Lens Blur effect that came with AE CS 5.5 and CS 6 doesn't look nearly as good as the old Lens Blur effect that came with CS 5; it's pretty much unusable for my purposes. Foreground elements that should be sharp render sharp, but with a blurry halo around them. The old Camera Lens blur does not exhibit this behavior, nor the Frischluft Depth of Field plugin.

Here's an image showing the depth map and how the three plugins render it:

CameraLensBlur.png

The images are composited from 16-bit PNGs rendered out of Cinema 4D. There's a nasty halo visible around the foreground particle in the upper left in the CS6 Camera Lens Blur version. I saved the old Lens Blur effect as a preset out of a CS5 project and am, fortunately, still able to use that approach in CS6 since the "improved" version of the plugin looks pretty crummy (I skipped AE CS5.5). As a test I installed the demo of Frishluft's Lenscare plugins, and after inverting the depth buffer in the plugin I got a good result.

The "new" Camera Lens Blur is acting like the Compound Blur effect. Foreground elements appear sharp but with a blurry halo since the entire "background" is being blurred, creating a blurred ghost of the foreground element. The old Lens Blur effect was very slow, but it did work.

Anyone know how to make this new "improved" Camera Lens Blur look like the other plugins?  I've posted a zipped file with the image and depth map in a small AE CS6 project here if anyone here would care to check my settings.  Maybe I'm missing somthing.

CameraBlurs folder.zip

Thank you.

Shawn Marshall

Marshall Arts Motion Graphics

[Seb.James]

Any news on a fix for this yet, Adobe? 7 years is a LONG, LONG time for a bug not to be fixed.

[Cliffordli]

Hey, 2021 now...problem still...

[Seb.James]

I've watched this thread avidly to see if Adobe ever fixes this, I gave in as they NEVER will and bought Fast Bokeh Pro from AE Scripts. There's a free version of it, the pro version just expands upon this. Link: https://aescripts.com/fast-bokeh/