3 Ways to Fake Depth of Field in Adobe After Effects

so there are two main ways i create maps inside of adobe after effects the first is using the premium extension geo layers 3 and the second is using after effects in conjunction with google earth studio now both of these workflows have some limitations the main feature that's lacking is the fact that you can't use depth of field inside of the 3d cameras in after effects without doing some kind of work around so in today's video i'm going to show you three ways that you can fake depth of field inside of adobe after effects big shout out to my tier 3 patrons tyson the keymaster samaramati joseph culligan mike and sandra over at youtube flumiplus1 and josh thanks again folks for making this video possible this animation was actually created in google earth studio it's a flyover of the alps i added some track points and here are some text elements and this is kind of a low angle shot and it's a perfect example of where you can use like a shallow depth of field look to help make your image pop because we clearly have a foreground a middle ground and a background here and i tried to place the text elements in those different like focal planes so that when we add our depth of field you'll really start to notice it taking effect so if you're familiar with the workflow you can see here that when you export something from google earth studio and you have track points that you've added you can export a script file which you can then use inside of adobe after effects to automatically launch and automatically set up your entire project so that's what i've done here and if you notice it looks like this is a proper 3d project because we have a camera down here that's actually flying around it has keyframes and there's these 3d text layers but the way that this is set up is if you look here the image sequence of our mountains is not 3d it's just a 2d plane so if i were to go to the camera here and i were to enable the depth of field and make it you know really shallow and start to crank it up i don't even know where the focus point is you're going to notice that only the text elements are being affected by that the mountains are not being affected by that at all because once again it's a 2d layer this is why i need to have these techniques of faking the depth of field and the same thing goes with a lot of the cases inside of geo layers 3. okay so the first method it's the fastest and easiest way to get this done however it has no customization options and it doesn't give you a very realistic look so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to right click in the comp and i'm going to go to new adjustment layer and i'm going to rename this adjustment layer blur now the way that adjustment layers work is with the render order any anything underneath that adjustment layer or below it will be affected by whatever effects you put on there and anything above it will not be affected so if you want something in your sequence to not be affected by the depth of field blur simply place it above the adjustment layer now i'm going to go to my effects and presets panel and i will open up blur and sharpen and i'm gonna go grab the gaussian blur and place that on my adjustment layer and now as i start to crank this up you'll notice that it is affecting the entire frame here now i'm going to go grab my pen tool and simply draw a mask i can actually grab the rectangle tool and draw on a mask here and i'm going to make sure that i have it come pretty far this way because i'm going to be blurring out the edges of this mask so now right away you'll see that it's blurring only the middle and the way you want to place this mask is you want to create your little plane of focus this is where you want things to be in focus outside of the mask will be out of focus so i'm going to switch my mask of the blur to subtract and now i have what looks like the beginning of this fake depth of field however if you zoom in on the edges here you'll notice that they're quite sharp so i need to grab the layer and hit the f key for feather mask feather and then i can just feather this out until it looks good so maybe something like 300 pixels and just like that we have a quick down and dirty depth of field now to make it a little more dynamic i could go in and manually draw the mask is usually what i do i don't just do a rectangle but this is just a good example and naturally i don't want to cover that logo up as well so i could just you know come over here and maybe move this down here like that this method is pretty cool and it's you can do it really fast but you'll notice the gaussian blur doesn't have a lot of options for customization you have blurriness blur dimensions and then repeat edge pixels which you have to turn that on by the way otherwise you're going to have sharp edges so that leads me to the second method so let's start again from scratch here i'm going to go right click new adjustment layer and this time i'll rename it blur this time i'm going to go grab the camera lens blur we're doing a fake camera lens blur so why wouldn't we use the camera lens blur effect am i right so i'll crank the blur radius here so you'll see right away i have all of these different parameters for this particular blur you'll also notice that it's taking much longer to load so render render time render speed is very much um a parameter here that you want to pay attention to so often times if you're working with a bunch of stuff and you need speed like you're cranking you want to crank something out real fast you might want to use a gaussian blur and then when you're delivering the final for you know the final high-end high resolution file maybe you slap the camera lens blur to give it more uh quality and this blur is just a lot more dynamic and it's more of a obviously by the name it's a camera lens blur and you can specify iris properties here so you can change all the different shapes here you have diffraction options so you you can change the aspect ratio to make it look more if you want to go for like an anamorphic look and i could go through and simply do another mask on my adjustment layer but if you look down here there's a section called blur map and it has a layer option so now if i go and i go create a new solid i'm going to create a new solid it doesn't matter what color it is because i'm going to be using the alpha information here to use to basically have that edge of the blur i'll name this blur map and i'm going to do the same thing here i'm going to grab the rectangle tool and i'll quickly draw this rectangle and i'll go to subtract and now under blur map i'm going to select the blur map layer and it's important that i go to effects and masks so that it will accept the mask and then for channel i'm going to select alpha and now i need to actually turn this layer off and now you can see that blur however i did not feather this out so let's go back and feather this out by 300 pixels and you can see how much longer this is taking to load you probably want to blur this out even more maybe something like 500 and already this blur is looking a lot more dynamic however i think with this particular effect you really have to feather this out and you see all the different channel options here i can use different color values as well as luminance values so you could actually use this effect to give you like blooming glows or to you know blow out your highlights or to give a bunch of different interesting looks if you want to go crazy with it you can see there's a highlight section down here but if you look at the blur focal distance you can also animate your focal plane so as you can see right now if i zoom in this track point in the middle is in focus so if i grab blur focal distance and i start to shift this you'll notice that now my focal plane shifts back to here so now you can animate your focal plane crazy okay so if you aren't happy with these two techniques there is a third technique using a premium tool called bokeh so if you're into photography at all i'm sure you know about bokeh it's a very specific effect that you get when you are changing your focus with specific type of lenses so to apply this i'm going to add a new adjustment layer and now i'm going to go to this i already have it installed i'm going to drop this on my adjustment layer now here we have another depth mat as well so i'm going to go back to i'm going to grab this blur map that i created before i'm going to paste it here rename this blur and there's a ton of different parameters for this if i go down to depth mat you can see now i can grab this same kind of deal as the blur map for the effect before effects and masks and for channel i'll switch this over to alpha once again and now look at all of these different parameters we have once again you can animate the focal distance look at the bokeh that we have over here this is just from the default settings here i haven't even changed any of the parameters yet and already look at this look at this beautiful stuff over here and you know how it always goes if you want high quality you have to pay for it with render time so if you compare the different render times now these sequences if you see the first technique with the gaussian blur you have 419 milliseconds for every frame for the camera lens blur effect we have a little over three seconds and for boca you have roughly seven seconds so this is a serious thing to consider especially for me when i'm rendering out like some clients i it's it's a very tight turnaround so boca isn't always the best option sometimes you know you go down with the down and dirty gaussian blur because it's fast it renders fast so if you have the luxury of time definitely check out boca if you don't maybe try out camera lens blur if even that's taking too long check out the down and dirty gaussian blur technique okay so there you have it there are three ways you can fake depth of field inside of adobe after effects i hope you enjoyed the video if you did be sure to hit that thumbs up button if you want to see more videos like this check out my monday maps playlist link in the video description and if you really like the content head over to my patreon page link in the description as well and be sure to check back every monday for other videos and if you want to subscribe to the channel and hit that notification bell that would be cool see in the next one

Channel: Boone Loves Video

Views: 15,793

Keywords: boone loves video, boone, adobe after effects tutorial, crossphere bokeh, after effects bokeh, how to fake depth of field in adobe after effects, adobe after effects 2022 tutorial, ae tutorial 2022, depth of field after effects, how to get depth of field in after effects, camera lens blur after effects, gaussian blur after effects, how to get bokeh in after effects, bokeh effect after effects, how to add blur in after effects

Id: JfM0o4UjMFU

Length: 9min 44sec (584 seconds)

Published: Mon May 09 2022