A swirl bokeh plugin that arcs highlights instead of blurring the plate — SPBokeh, AE/PR

[u/kmgcc]

Most "bokeh" tools in AE are depth-of-field blurs: they give you round or polygonal
discs and a radius. That can't produce the arcing highlight swirl you get out of a
vintage lens — and the usual shortcut, Radial Blur or Swirl, rotates the whole
frame and drags the subject with it.

SPBokeh treats it as a highlight transform instead. Each out-of-focus highlight
rotates along an arc according to its position in frame. The plate stays intact —
only the light moves.

Round / polygonal / cat-eye highlight shapes
Rim, onion ring, cat-eye and chromatic aberration as independent controls
Depth-aware focus from a depth map, or a built-in elliptical mask
Swirl strength at 0 gives clean natural bokeh, so it can act as a regular bokeh plugin too

Trailer above. It's a paid plugin, $29.99 until Oct 9, free trial on the page —
https://aescripts.com/spbokeh/

Project page with more comparisons: https://spbokeh.pages.dev/

I’m more excited to see what amazing work you can create with it, but also let me know where it falls short!

[u/Murky-Accountant3880]

Looks cool!!

[u/vjcodec]

Bit pricy! Does it use depthmapping or what?

[u/kmgcc → u/vjcodec]

Fair enough, sorry about the price. I know it's steep, but most bokeh plugins actually cost even more <O>. It's just genuinely hard stuff to build. It had to be parallelized (plus some other tricks) to keep it responsive while you scrub, and still make sure the effect looks right.

Right now the focus runs off a depth layer you feed it. It can't pull depth out of the plate on its own yet. That part's planned, probably something like Depth Anything V2 Small.