Frischluft Bundle for Adobe After Effects 10.1.2017

Frischluft Video Effects Plug-ins for Adobe After Effects. enscare 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.

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.

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.

Glass Sphere
A shiny glass sphere with lots of options to adjust material, lighting and refraction.

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.

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.

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.

Fresh Curves
Curves are a very versatile and precise color correction tool. The native After Effects version lacks control and accuracy to take full advantage of it. Fresh Curves makes up for these drawbacks so you can get the most out of this basic tool.

More channels
Fresh Curves has brightness, saturation and hue channels for more direct control on top of the usual RGBA.

Relative Curves
Now it's possible to adjust on attributes based on another. Relative Curves also has a built-in preblur and a postblur curve.

Bezier cubic splines
with tangent handles for more curve control. Interpolation modes similar to the ones in the AE graph editor round things off.

Invert Curves
Using invert you can work in your own color space. Apply your custom "gamma curve", do the work and apply and the inverted one.

Histogramm
The integrated histograms helps you find and modify desired areas and gives feedback to your changes.

Interface
Tired of that old, tiny interface? Here is a big, nice resizeable one.

Zoom tools
will come in handy for those out of range float colors or when fiddeling with details.

Edit and sample
Need to be precise? Just edit or sample your values. And change the color range to what you are comfortable with.

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.

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.

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.

Lensfeed
The product has been in an unsatisfying state for a long time now. It was lacking proper support for current camera APIs and was also lacking in terms of usability. It has always been a hack into a program that does not support what this plugin tried to achieve. The architectural changes in After Effects 2015 break this hack and it can't be fixed easily.

What it does
Lensfeed shows a camera's live preview inside After Effects. No still frames but a moving live feed! Lensfeed is implemented as regular After Effects filters so the livefeed is displayed inside compositions and can can be treated like regular footage.

What it is good for
This tool comes in handy to optimize shots for compositions. Especially to adjust green- or bluescreen scenes to existing footage. Using Lensfeed you can match perspective and lighting to achieve believable setups. And since all the effects can be applied to the live footage it's possible to optimize it for the keying tools used. This helps creating higher quality footage and in reducing the work on the actual composition later.

How it works
After Effects was not made with moving live footage in mind. So implementing it was a bit tricky. Lensfeed consists of effect plugins that render the current image from the camera to the composition and a general After Effects plugin that makes it animate. This second plugin unfortunately only works in After Effects. So in other hosts there will only be single non animated frames. Possibly there will be solutions for those in the future.

ZbornToy - the after effects plugin
Our debut product is made to lead a line of tools that introduce a new meaning to depth in compositing. The ZbornToy has the ability to extract a maximum of information out of simple depth images and allows you to not only light and texture them, but to refract backgrounds, cast caustic reflection back onto the background and a whole lot more.

What's New:
- Lenscare updated to v1.48 to support new releases of After Effects CC.

Requirements: Adobe After Effects through AE CC release installed.

Home Page - http://www.frischluft.com/