Filter: Designer Blur.
Designer Blur creates a blur effect. Surprised? The charm of this plugin, however, is how it creates the blur. Point to a pre-defined shape or a grayscale map as a blur kernel which shapes and blends the blur. This process produces beautiful painterly and lighting effects.
Original Artbeats stock footage, no Blur [play]
Gaussian kernel and our Anarchist Edge filter applied [play] |
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Diamond kernel for a subtle, sparkly effect [play]
Star kernel and a Darken transfer mode for a dramatic, high contrast effect [play] |
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The kernel of truth, er, blur.
Ah… the heart of Designer Blur. This is the shape used to blur your footage. Through the Blur Type pop-up, you can choose one of eight default geometric shapes, like a Spiral or a Diamond.
Blur Kernels come in two varieties, 1D and 2D. The 2D kernels take longer for the blur engine to render, as they are more elaborate shapes. 1D shapes render faster and are good under time constraints. |
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You can also build your own kernel. This is really cool! Any image can be used, but bitmap grayscale images (or, graymaps) work best. Load in your custom blur shape through the Blur Type's Custom Shape option. Then use the Custom Shape parameters to apply your kernel.
Original ArtBeats footage of skydivers [play] and custom blur shapes.
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Our flower graphics create a custom map with blurred out edges. The Blur is animated from 0 to 50, which makes the flower shape grow. [play] |
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Set Blur Shape & Direction.
Blur Amount is your primary way to apply Designer Blur. These options control how large the blurred kernels will be. Their size decides how blurry your image becomes.
If Uniform Blur is unchecked, the Vertical Blur Amount and Horizontal Blur Amount controls appear. These options set different blur amounts for - you guessed it - the vertical and horizontal directions. This allows for creative results, as shown below.
Original footage of digital sky and water [play] |
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Horizontal Blur 25, Vertical Blur 0 [play] |
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Horizontal Blur 20, Vertical Blur 100 [play] |
Use a Blur grayscale map.
As with most of the Toolbox filters, you can use a grayscale map to make your results more powerful. Graymaps are a pretty powerful way of working, and a method that's used by many filters in After Effects. In Designer Blur, the BCL Layer option controls the amount of blur that is created.
What does this mean? Where the BCL Layer is black, there’s no blur in the image you're affecting. Where BLC layer is white, the blur is at its maximum potential. Shades of gray have a varying effect. |
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Grayscale graphic loaded into BCL Layer. |
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Box 1D kernel, Uniform Blur 8, with BCL [play] |
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Box 1D kernel, Uniform Blur 8, no BCL [play] |
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