How long do you think it will be before someone releases commercially available software [emphasis on what you can buy and not what you know about] that will produce beautiful bokeh in the OOF of scanned images?

Just wanted your opinion.

Art

-- Art (AKarr90975@aol.com), June 06, 2002

Answers

um i thought photoshop gaussian blur can do that already...

-- Dexter Legaspi (dalegaspi@hotmail.com), June 06, 2002.

Dexter wrote: "um i thought photoshop gaussian blur can do that already..."

Not according to this site, which refers to the "ugly stains" produced by simple gaussian blur. Check out a the boke machinations of the Iris Filter here:

http://www.messia.com/IrisFilter/intro_en.html

-- Brian Walsh (brian.walsh@sbcglobal.net), June 06, 2002.

Dexter:

Not really: I am running PS 7 on OSX and mine won't do that. But then I have this non-commericial software. ;<) People send me stuff.

Just wondered.

Art

-- Art (AKarr90975@aol.com), June 06, 2002.

I'm not saying that this is not possible, but Gaussian blur does not have the same effect as a lens with naturally nice bokeh. I shoot tri-x in Rodinal, which has a very pronounced grain structure. As soon as you use Gaussian blur, or any other PS filter, the grain texture is changed along with the rest of the image. The end result looks very artificial.

Combine that with the fact that most software developers probably know (and care) very little about subtleties of image such as Bokeh, and I think you're in for a long wait.

-- Noah (naddis@mindspring.com), June 06, 2002.

i stand corrected.

-- Dexter Legaspi (dalegaspi@hotmail.com), June 06, 2002.

...however - with FINE-GRAIN films (Pan F, Velvia) the Gaussian blur can be used to restore some of the bokeh that gets 'damaged' in the scanning process. Breaking the image down into 256 levels (or 256 levels cubed in color images) can cause some banding or posterizing in the very smooth soft parts of the image - and so does using unsharp mask to sharpen the focused bits.

Running a gaussian blur with a radius of about 1 pixel will dump these artifacts without artificially changing how OOF the image looks. You're not ADDING blur diameter, you're just keeping what's already there as smooth as it was originally on film.

-- Andy Piper (apidens@denver.infi.net), June 06, 2002.

Art, I think it is impossible IN PRINCIPLE: the rendition of OOF area essentially depends not only on lens design, but also on the distance (how far is a point from the focus plane). After the shot is made the distance information is lost, there is no way to recover 3-D information from 2-D projection of that 3-D scene (unless we deal with holography). Human eye can recover it because it does understand the meaning of the scene. No mashine can do it, and I strongly suspect never will able to _understand_ something.

There are some software that try to make some guesses about the lost 3rd dimension, but it is poor attempts.

-- Andrey Vorobyov (AndreyVorobyov@hotbox.ru), June 07, 2002.

How could software possibly be created that would reproduce what is essentially the aestetic opinion of the owner of the software?

-- Jim Lennon (jim@jmlennon.com), June 07, 2002.

I think Andrey is exactly right about being able to accurately reproduce bokeh using software. They can probably come up with something that has a pleasing/interesting effect, but it won't be the same as real bokeh.

-- Mike Dixon (mike@mikedixonphotography.com), June 08, 2002.