7 ms·

About Bokeh

152 points by luu 7y ago

StillBored 7y ago
And its all done in software (or ML) with recent phones to get around the lack of a good lenses system. And for most people it seems to work satisfactorily. This has been one of the complaints against camera manufactures recently, that the firmware on the cameras is wildly archaic.
- bufferoverflow 7y ago
  It works horribly with hair and sharp edges even on the flagship phones. Plus it can't possibly work correctly with transparent and semi-transparent objects like glass.
  - distances 7y ago
    My main complaint isn't that it doesn't work through glasses, but rather that it can't handle the frames at all. They are always blurred if the photo isn't taken from directly in front. It's a bit surprising as so many people use glasses -- a third, maybe? One could think that to be a major use case.
- volkk 7y ago
  im curious to see how good it will get in like 5-10 years because right now, to a mildly trained eye its very noticeably bad
- behringer 7y ago
  As a photographer I really don't ever want to use the camera software. Even when it's perfect for my application, I want RAW photographs because you have to fix so many other things before you ever get to special effects. You need to crop, color correct, distortion correct, noise correct, exposure correct. Only after that would you ever really want to apply some kind of bokeh filter. The entire reason to use a high end camera is to do it right. Camera software is never going to do it right until they start putting photoshop on cameras.
  - mchristen 7y ago
    It's not the software that holds back phone cameras. It's the literal size and shape of the sensors and lens. You can already shoot RAW on a phone, but putting Photoshop on the phone won't solve the lack of depth of field inherent to the lens and sensor setup.
    - jfengel 7y ago
      Does the RAW format save the kind of information that the software uses to guess at bokeh (depth sensors, multiple lenses, multiple shots, defocused pixels)? Or is there some other format that could save all that info, so you could really use the phone but do the processing later?
      - linuxdude314 7y ago
        There’s no, but there isn’t really a need. The R package mentioned in a comment in this thread achieves a similar effect using no additional data. Ray tracing will suffice!
        BubRoss 7y ago
        It shows a hand made depth map. You can't just 'raytrace' a 2D image and magically add depth of field.
  - gnopgnip 7y ago
    You can shoot in raw on most high end smartphones now if you want to do handle that after the fact, but the default used by the camera software does all of that
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - droitbutch 7y ago
    > You need to crop, color correct, distortion correct, noise correct, exposure correct. Only after that would you ever really want to apply some kind of bokeh filter. Modern phones already do all that - and seemingly in that order. As a photographer, what I find lacking are the lenses. You can only squeeze so much light from the relatively tiny lenses. Perfect recent example was kids Christmas play. Sitting back 25+ meters, with somewhat dim lighting and fast moving kids, I could see the other parents with their smartphones and tablets getting very poor photo's and vids - whereas my Nikon had zoom galore and excellent clear focus. Physics matters.
- endorphone 7y ago
  "the lack of a good lenses system" This is very much a subjective interpretation and I don't mean to be picking at nits, however most smartphones have tremendous lens systems. They just happen to have a short focal length (e.g. 1.54mm, 4.25mm and 6mm on the iPhone 11). Depth of field is primarily a function of focal length, and the smaller the focal length the larger the depth of field. Which is why portrait photographers often use zoom lenses. In the real world though 99% of the time what people are aiming for is simply sharp photos where the subject is in focus. That small focal length makes that much, much more likely, yielding a dramatically higher percentage of "keeper" photos. Shallow depth of field photos are a gimmick in most cases.
- penagwin 7y ago
  If we're talking about non-point and shoot cameras, such as DSLRs or Mirrorless Cameras that cost $500+ such as my Sony A6000, I absolutely DO NOT want post-processing done on my camera. Portrait mode on my iPhone 7+ looks okay at a glance, but thinks like hair, wires, and twigs are TERRIBLE on closer inspection. Not to say the software couldn't be improved. For example, after taking a 20 second exposure, I have to wait another ~15 seconds before I can take another photo. I'd love for that processing time to be cut down.
  - lame-robot-hoax 7y ago
    I mean, you are using an iPhone 7, iirc that’s the first iPhone to implement portrait mode. The processing time on my iPhone 11 that I just got is minimal. I upgraded from an iPhone 6S so I’m not sure what the processing time was like on iPhones with portrait mode prior to the 11 models though. As well, who’s to say what Apple could do when given an image from a high end camera sensor instead of the tiny one in an iPhone? And lastly, why not just enable power users to turn it off? Sure you can say manpower would be better directed at other problems, but who cares if post processing capabilities are on the camera if you can turn it off? Those who want it use it. Those who don’t don’t.
    - krzyk 7y ago
      My wife has iPhone 8, I can't find portrait mode on it (I'm coming from Pixel 3 so I was wondering how it looks on iPhones). When I scroll the photo modes there is no such thing as "portrait". Or maybe it is only for the Plus models with two cameras?
      - zakki 7y ago
        Yeah, it is on plus model including animoji
    - throwanem 7y ago
      > who’s to say what Apple could do when given an image from a high end camera sensor instead of the tiny one in an iPhone? Ruin it. But they wouldn't, because there'd be no need. The thing about a big high-end camera sensor is that having one means you don't need to fake bokeh. You can put a good fast prime lens in front of it and get the real thing. Phone cameras have to post-process their way to it because the physics of their small sensors mean they simply aren't capable of capturing enough off-axis light to produce true bokeh.
- gerbilly 7y ago
  Ugh, most people probably eat fast food three times a week too.
- __jal 7y ago
  > And for most people it seems to work satisfactorily Most people apparently don't look at their pictures. The "enhanced" photos I've gotten from the Iphone for the last few models have just been getting worse. They look OK if you don't look too closely, but then they're just wrong. Blurry details on the same focal plane as crisp ones, crappy details with translucency, hair or anything else that confuses the "foreground/background" detector, they're just bad. My DLSR will be in service for quite a while longer.
  - alistairSH 7y ago
    Same experience here. My guess is most people view their photos on their phones, via Instagram or Facebook. Rarely are photos looked at in full size on a high quality monitor. I have no intention of giving up my Olympus mirrorless system. I'll probably add at least one more lens to my collection next year - I've been relying on my 12-40 f2.8 for portraits, but I'm liking what I've read about the Sigma 56 f1.4.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - month13 7y ago
    The watercolour effect from the de-noiser in iOS results in watercolour-esque patterns in the final image, and washes away most of the fine detail at 1:1. FWIW, I have an iPhone X. The watercolour trend started around the iPhone 5s, IIRC.
- throwanem 7y ago
  No, it hasn't. This comes up every time someone on HN mentions anything to do with photography - mostly, it seems, from people who don't do a lot of photography or at the very least aren't closely familiar with interchangeable-lens cameras - and it never stops being nonsense. There are plenty of things that could be improved about DSLR and mirrorless cameras, in the firmware and out of it. The number of those things which are in any way related to, or could be in any way improved by, the idea of jamming a smartphone into an interchangeable-lens camera, is zero. (In case anyone's inclined to question my own chops: that's fair, considering my line of argument. I don't post much of my work lately, but here's my best shot of 2019, taken from a distance of six inches with a Nikon D500 and a 105mm macro lens: https://aaron-m.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/DSC_9393.jpg https://aaron-m.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/DSC_9393.jpg - so you can look at that and judge for yourself whether I'm qualified to speak to the question of how familiarity with interchangeable-lens cameras influences the perceived value of junking up their UI with a lot of smartphone garbage.)
michelpp 7y ago
One of my favorite Bokeh lenses is the Nikon 500mm reflex telephoto lens. The "Mak" style with a rear primary mirror and a front secondary works a lot like common compact telescopes. The Bokeh is tricky to apply, it's a fixed zoom telephoto lens so your subject must be at least 10 meters or so a way and it's hard to handhold, but the "donut" aperture of the lens makes for some very cool (or weird depending on your tastes) effects. The article calls this a "bad" lens but I love the effect.
- jiofih 7y ago
  Almost anything can be used well for artistic effect. Here are some shots from the Nikkor 500mm: http://www.indeed.co.jp/blog/scrap2/lens/reflexnikkor_500mm_f8/ http://www.indeed.co.jp/blog/scrap2/lens/reflexnikkor_500mm_...
  - LolWolf 7y ago
    This is a lovely example, thank you for the link!
  - Stratoscope 7y ago
    Oh, very nice! Since we're sharing bokeh photos, here's my favorite of the ones I've taken. It's the "creamy" style, not circular. Olympus E-P5 with Olympus 75mm F/1.8 (my favorite portrait lens): https://geary.smugmug.com/Pets/Dogs/i-dNMQW2v/A https://geary.smugmug.com/Pets/Dogs/i-dNMQW2v/A
- droitbutch 7y ago
  Your definition conflicts with the author's. 1st paragraph: >as I own this site, I get to define good and bad Bokeh for the purposes here! The other key term is “image.” Bokeh is a property of IMAGES, not a property of LENSES.
  - elcomet 7y ago
    And yet more than half of the page is about lenses.
  - 7y ago
pyridines 7y ago
As a very nearsighted person, I can see bokeh if I take off my glasses and look at points of light - either nearby small lights, or far-away large lights. Also, when I look at a bright sky through a tree's canopy, the canopy transforms into a breathtaking mosaic of bokeh, which becomes animated if the tree is swaying in the wind. Can people with normal vision experience this?
- saagarjha 7y ago
  I can if I squint. I have glasses, though.
- seszett 7y ago
  I have good vision, and I can see good bokeh if I focus closer than the objects I see, and bad bokeh if I focus farther than them (which is much easier to do).
- tudelo 7y ago
  finally, an advantage for the near-blind
- tomc1985 7y ago
  Not sure what it is I'm doing but intentionally blurring my vision creates a sort of visual bokeh
- gdubs 7y ago
  For me, points of light look like the canonical star shapes you see in telescope photos — which I don’t really understand because from what I’ve read, that effect is due to the braces which hold the telescope’s lens in place.
  - arjie 7y ago
    That's called a 'starburst' and it happens in human eyes for all sorts of reasons. It's possible naturally and also as a LASIK complication, for instance. Look for 'starburst' here https://visionsimulations.com/ https://visionsimulations.com/ Sadly the simulation site is down because of the new Cross-Origin restrictions on images in canvases but perhaps you can see what it looks like in the preview images on the main page and if you google 'starburst vision'.
amrrs 7y ago
An R package `rayshader` that can emulate bokeh. It's nice read. https://www.tylermw.com/portrait-mode-data/ https://www.tylermw.com/portrait-mode-data/
- tylermw 7y ago
  Thanks for the shoutout!
timw4mail 7y ago
Lots of mirror lens bashing :( Bokeh is subjective. While the rings instead of filled circles resulting from a mirror lens look worse in many cases, I have seen cases where the 'rings' actually add to the image.
thyselius 7y ago
Someone should mention the oval shaped, very cinematic, Anamorphic bokeh. Bokeh is not just the shape of blurry small light sources, but also changes the quality of any out of focus region, since the blur is doubled vertically compared to horizontally. A good read on the subject with images https://www.provideocoalition.com/three-lenses-a-look-at-bokeh-depth-of-field-and-geometry/ https://www.provideocoalition.com/three-lenses-a-look-at-bok...
- twic 7y ago
  I cringe whenever i see that oval bokeh in a film. It's so jarring. I can't believe a competent cinematographer would ever allow it in their shot.
  - crazygringo 7y ago
    Competent cinematography is about artistry and emotion, and whatever technical standards are necessary to achieve that. And everything with technical issues about tradeoffs. Movies are chock-full of tradeoffs. Oval bokeh is... hardly noticeable to anyone except professional photographers, and also isn't inherently "bad", it's just different, and has its own personality. If your standards are so perfectionist, I have a hard time believing you find any of Hollywood's cinematographers -- whether blockbuster or indie -- up to your competent standards. ;)
murgindrag 7y ago
Shape is important. I find that some lenses have a different look on-axis versus off-axis, either leading to ugly smearing, or pretty twirly bokeh. The aesthetic also depends on image. Nice crisp circles of light are sometimes nicer than a Gaussian blur. As someone pointed out, mirror lenses have their uses too. But there are lenses with just bad bokeh too.
- jake-low 7y ago
  > I find that some lenses have a different look on-axis versus off-axis, either leading to ugly smearing, or pretty twirly bokeh. This is indeed pretty interesting. It seems like double-Gauss lens designs like the Zeiss Planar and Biotar are especially prone to this kind of distortion. There's a Russian copy of the 58mm Biotar called the Helios 44 that's popular on eBay for this reason (lots of people use an adapter to put it on a MFT camera and shoot video with it).
jonas21 7y ago
If anyone's interested in the technical details of implementing state of the art real-time bokeh in a game engine, Guillaume Abadie's "Life of a Bokeh" slides from SIGGRAPH 2018 are really good: https://epicgames.ent.box.com/s/s86j70iamxvsuu6j35pilypficznec04 https://epicgames.ent.box.com/s/s86j70iamxvsuu6j35pilypficzn... Unfortunately, a video of the talk doesn't seem to be available online.
virtualritz 7y ago
I am surprised about how biased this article is in assigning attributes like ‘good’, ‘bad’ or ‘perfect’ to Bokeh shapes. You can talk about this in these terms solely from an optical engineering pov. The shape of Bokeh is often why a lens get picked for a shot. What the author calls ‘bad Bokeh’ other people call ‘soap bubble Bokeh’ (google for it) and they are willing to cash out [2] for owning a lens that can produce this sort of thing. This is an artistic choice[1]. This article’s generic statement that this sort of Bokeh creates images where the out of focus BG areas distract from the FG/in focus motive shows a narrow understanding of how Bokeh can be used in composing an image. [1] https://www.shutterbug.com/content/creating-unique-macro-images-vintage-meyer-optik-goerlitz-%E2%80%9Csoap-bubble%E2%80%9D-lens https://www.shutterbug.com/content/creating-unique-macro-ima... [2] Caveat: I bought a Meyer Optik Trioplan 100mm f/2.8 replica on Kickstarter for this very reason: the ‘bad’ soap bubble Bokeh. I love this lens.
- capn_cabbage 7y ago
  Sentences 3 and 4 in the article seem to excuse this. Is there further information that I may be missing regarding why the bias is still a problem?
- scarejunba 7y ago
  > Two key terms in this definition are SUBJECTIVE and IMAGE. One cannot measure bokeh, as it is something that may be pleasing to one person and not another. I have my opinion of what makes for good bokeh, and, as I own this site, I get to define good and bad Bokeh for the purposes here! And every time he mentions it he uses those caveats. > You may have your own idea of what good bokeh is, but this site will be evaluating lenses based on MY opinions. And lets face it, there are actually times when BAD bokeh really works for a shot, but that is usually for people who have a whole lot more artistic talent than I do.
- fireattack 7y ago
  To my personal taste, the bubbles in photos of your link 1 is very distracting.
  - 7y ago
nimish 7y ago
Isn't the airy disk the right PSF to use here?
kseo3l 7y ago
if bokeh gets to this point, I don't know how is it going to look in the future. Is photography going to die

152 points by luu 7y ago

And its all done in software (or ML) with recent phones to get around the lack of a good lenses system. And for most people it seems to work satisfactorily. This has been one of the complaints against camera manufactures recently, that the firmware on the cameras is wildly archaic.

bufferoverflow 7y ago
It works horribly with hair and sharp edges even on the flagship phones. Plus it can't possibly work correctly with transparent and semi-transparent objects like glass.
- distances 7y ago
  My main complaint isn't that it doesn't work through glasses, but rather that it can't handle the frames at all. They are always blurred if the photo isn't taken from directly in front. It's a bit surprising as so many people use glasses -- a third, maybe? One could think that to be a major use case.
volkk 7y ago
im curious to see how good it will get in like 5-10 years because right now, to a mildly trained eye its very noticeably bad
behringer 7y ago
As a photographer I really don't ever want to use the camera software. Even when it's perfect for my application, I want RAW photographs because you have to fix so many other things before you ever get to special effects. You need to crop, color correct, distortion correct, noise correct, exposure correct. Only after that would you ever really want to apply some kind of bokeh filter. The entire reason to use a high end camera is to do it right. Camera software is never going to do it right until they start putting photoshop on cameras.
- mchristen 7y ago
  It's not the software that holds back phone cameras. It's the literal size and shape of the sensors and lens. You can already shoot RAW on a phone, but putting Photoshop on the phone won't solve the lack of depth of field inherent to the lens and sensor setup.
  - jfengel 7y ago
    Does the RAW format save the kind of information that the software uses to guess at bokeh (depth sensors, multiple lenses, multiple shots, defocused pixels)? Or is there some other format that could save all that info, so you could really use the phone but do the processing later?
    - linuxdude314 7y ago
      There’s no, but there isn’t really a need. The R package mentioned in a comment in this thread achieves a similar effect using no additional data. Ray tracing will suffice!
      - BubRoss 7y ago
        It shows a hand made depth map. You can't just 'raytrace' a 2D image and magically add depth of field.
- gnopgnip 7y ago
  You can shoot in raw on most high end smartphones now if you want to do handle that after the fact, but the default used by the camera software does all of that
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- droitbutch 7y ago
  > You need to crop, color correct, distortion correct, noise correct, exposure correct. Only after that would you ever really want to apply some kind of bokeh filter. Modern phones already do all that - and seemingly in that order. As a photographer, what I find lacking are the lenses. You can only squeeze so much light from the relatively tiny lenses. Perfect recent example was kids Christmas play. Sitting back 25+ meters, with somewhat dim lighting and fast moving kids, I could see the other parents with their smartphones and tablets getting very poor photo's and vids - whereas my Nikon had zoom galore and excellent clear focus. Physics matters.
endorphone 7y ago
"the lack of a good lenses system" This is very much a subjective interpretation and I don't mean to be picking at nits, however most smartphones have tremendous lens systems. They just happen to have a short focal length (e.g. 1.54mm, 4.25mm and 6mm on the iPhone 11). Depth of field is primarily a function of focal length, and the smaller the focal length the larger the depth of field. Which is why portrait photographers often use zoom lenses. In the real world though 99% of the time what people are aiming for is simply sharp photos where the subject is in focus. That small focal length makes that much, much more likely, yielding a dramatically higher percentage of "keeper" photos. Shallow depth of field photos are a gimmick in most cases.
penagwin 7y ago
If we're talking about non-point and shoot cameras, such as DSLRs or Mirrorless Cameras that cost $500+ such as my Sony A6000, I absolutely DO NOT want post-processing done on my camera. Portrait mode on my iPhone 7+ looks okay at a glance, but thinks like hair, wires, and twigs are TERRIBLE on closer inspection. Not to say the software couldn't be improved. For example, after taking a 20 second exposure, I have to wait another ~15 seconds before I can take another photo. I'd love for that processing time to be cut down.
- lame-robot-hoax 7y ago
  I mean, you are using an iPhone 7, iirc that’s the first iPhone to implement portrait mode. The processing time on my iPhone 11 that I just got is minimal. I upgraded from an iPhone 6S so I’m not sure what the processing time was like on iPhones with portrait mode prior to the 11 models though. As well, who’s to say what Apple could do when given an image from a high end camera sensor instead of the tiny one in an iPhone? And lastly, why not just enable power users to turn it off? Sure you can say manpower would be better directed at other problems, but who cares if post processing capabilities are on the camera if you can turn it off? Those who want it use it. Those who don’t don’t.
  - krzyk 7y ago
    My wife has iPhone 8, I can't find portrait mode on it (I'm coming from Pixel 3 so I was wondering how it looks on iPhones). When I scroll the photo modes there is no such thing as "portrait". Or maybe it is only for the Plus models with two cameras?
    - zakki 7y ago
      Yeah, it is on plus model including animoji
  - throwanem 7y ago
    > who’s to say what Apple could do when given an image from a high end camera sensor instead of the tiny one in an iPhone? Ruin it. But they wouldn't, because there'd be no need. The thing about a big high-end camera sensor is that having one means you don't need to fake bokeh. You can put a good fast prime lens in front of it and get the real thing. Phone cameras have to post-process their way to it because the physics of their small sensors mean they simply aren't capable of capturing enough off-axis light to produce true bokeh.
gerbilly 7y ago
Ugh, most people probably eat fast food three times a week too.
__jal 7y ago
> And for most people it seems to work satisfactorily Most people apparently don't look at their pictures. The "enhanced" photos I've gotten from the Iphone for the last few models have just been getting worse. They look OK if you don't look too closely, but then they're just wrong. Blurry details on the same focal plane as crisp ones, crappy details with translucency, hair or anything else that confuses the "foreground/background" detector, they're just bad. My DLSR will be in service for quite a while longer.
- alistairSH 7y ago
  Same experience here. My guess is most people view their photos on their phones, via Instagram or Facebook. Rarely are photos looked at in full size on a high quality monitor. I have no intention of giving up my Olympus mirrorless system. I'll probably add at least one more lens to my collection next year - I've been relying on my 12-40 f2.8 for portraits, but I'm liking what I've read about the Sigma 56 f1.4.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- month13 7y ago
  The watercolour effect from the de-noiser in iOS results in watercolour-esque patterns in the final image, and washes away most of the fine detail at 1:1. FWIW, I have an iPhone X. The watercolour trend started around the iPhone 5s, IIRC.
throwanem 7y ago
No, it hasn't. This comes up every time someone on HN mentions anything to do with photography - mostly, it seems, from people who don't do a lot of photography or at the very least aren't closely familiar with interchangeable-lens cameras - and it never stops being nonsense. There are plenty of things that could be improved about DSLR and mirrorless cameras, in the firmware and out of it. The number of those things which are in any way related to, or could be in any way improved by, the idea of jamming a smartphone into an interchangeable-lens camera, is zero. (In case anyone's inclined to question my own chops: that's fair, considering my line of argument. I don't post much of my work lately, but here's my best shot of 2019, taken from a distance of six inches with a Nikon D500 and a 105mm macro lens: https://aaron-m.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/DSC_9393.jpg https://aaron-m.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/DSC_9393.jpg - so you can look at that and judge for yourself whether I'm qualified to speak to the question of how familiarity with interchangeable-lens cameras influences the perceived value of junking up their UI with a lot of smartphone garbage.)

michelpp 7y ago

One of my favorite Bokeh lenses is the Nikon 500mm reflex telephoto lens. The "Mak" style with a rear primary mirror and a front secondary works a lot like common compact telescopes. The Bokeh is tricky to apply, it's a fixed zoom telephoto lens so your subject must be at least 10 meters or so a way and it's hard to handhold, but the "donut" aperture of the lens makes for some very cool (or weird depending on your tastes) effects. The article calls this a "bad" lens but I love the effect.

jiofih 7y ago
Almost anything can be used well for artistic effect. Here are some shots from the Nikkor 500mm: http://www.indeed.co.jp/blog/scrap2/lens/reflexnikkor_500mm_f8/ http://www.indeed.co.jp/blog/scrap2/lens/reflexnikkor_500mm_...
- LolWolf 7y ago
  This is a lovely example, thank you for the link!
- Stratoscope 7y ago
  Oh, very nice! Since we're sharing bokeh photos, here's my favorite of the ones I've taken. It's the "creamy" style, not circular. Olympus E-P5 with Olympus 75mm F/1.8 (my favorite portrait lens): https://geary.smugmug.com/Pets/Dogs/i-dNMQW2v/A https://geary.smugmug.com/Pets/Dogs/i-dNMQW2v/A
droitbutch 7y ago
Your definition conflicts with the author's. 1st paragraph: >as I own this site, I get to define good and bad Bokeh for the purposes here! The other key term is “image.” Bokeh is a property of IMAGES, not a property of LENSES.
- elcomet 7y ago
  And yet more than half of the page is about lenses.
- 7y ago

pyridines 7y ago

As a very nearsighted person, I can see bokeh if I take off my glasses and look at points of light - either nearby small lights, or far-away large lights. Also, when I look at a bright sky through a tree's canopy, the canopy transforms into a breathtaking mosaic of bokeh, which becomes animated if the tree is swaying in the wind. Can people with normal vision experience this?

saagarjha 7y ago
I can if I squint. I have glasses, though.
seszett 7y ago
I have good vision, and I can see good bokeh if I focus closer than the objects I see, and bad bokeh if I focus farther than them (which is much easier to do).
tudelo 7y ago
finally, an advantage for the near-blind
tomc1985 7y ago
Not sure what it is I'm doing but intentionally blurring my vision creates a sort of visual bokeh
gdubs 7y ago
For me, points of light look like the canonical star shapes you see in telescope photos — which I don’t really understand because from what I’ve read, that effect is due to the braces which hold the telescope’s lens in place.
- arjie 7y ago
  That's called a 'starburst' and it happens in human eyes for all sorts of reasons. It's possible naturally and also as a LASIK complication, for instance. Look for 'starburst' here https://visionsimulations.com/ https://visionsimulations.com/ Sadly the simulation site is down because of the new Cross-Origin restrictions on images in canvases but perhaps you can see what it looks like in the preview images on the main page and if you google 'starburst vision'.

amrrs 7y ago

An R package `rayshader` that can emulate bokeh. It's nice read. https://www.tylermw.com/portrait-mode-data/ https://www.tylermw.com/portrait-mode-data/

tylermw 7y ago
Thanks for the shoutout!

timw4mail 7y ago

Lots of mirror lens bashing :( Bokeh is subjective. While the rings instead of filled circles resulting from a mirror lens look worse in many cases, I have seen cases where the 'rings' actually add to the image.

thyselius 7y ago

Someone should mention the oval shaped, very cinematic, Anamorphic bokeh. Bokeh is not just the shape of blurry small light sources, but also changes the quality of any out of focus region, since the blur is doubled vertically compared to horizontally. A good read on the subject with images https://www.provideocoalition.com/three-lenses-a-look-at-bokeh-depth-of-field-and-geometry/ https://www.provideocoalition.com/three-lenses-a-look-at-bok...

twic 7y ago
I cringe whenever i see that oval bokeh in a film. It's so jarring. I can't believe a competent cinematographer would ever allow it in their shot.
- crazygringo 7y ago
  Competent cinematography is about artistry and emotion, and whatever technical standards are necessary to achieve that. And everything with technical issues about tradeoffs. Movies are chock-full of tradeoffs. Oval bokeh is... hardly noticeable to anyone except professional photographers, and also isn't inherently "bad", it's just different, and has its own personality. If your standards are so perfectionist, I have a hard time believing you find any of Hollywood's cinematographers -- whether blockbuster or indie -- up to your competent standards. ;)

murgindrag 7y ago

Shape is important. I find that some lenses have a different look on-axis versus off-axis, either leading to ugly smearing, or pretty twirly bokeh. The aesthetic also depends on image. Nice crisp circles of light are sometimes nicer than a Gaussian blur. As someone pointed out, mirror lenses have their uses too. But there are lenses with just bad bokeh too.

jake-low 7y ago
> I find that some lenses have a different look on-axis versus off-axis, either leading to ugly smearing, or pretty twirly bokeh. This is indeed pretty interesting. It seems like double-Gauss lens designs like the Zeiss Planar and Biotar are especially prone to this kind of distortion. There's a Russian copy of the 58mm Biotar called the Helios 44 that's popular on eBay for this reason (lots of people use an adapter to put it on a MFT camera and shoot video with it).

jonas21 7y ago

If anyone's interested in the technical details of implementing state of the art real-time bokeh in a game engine, Guillaume Abadie's "Life of a Bokeh" slides from SIGGRAPH 2018 are really good: https://epicgames.ent.box.com/s/s86j70iamxvsuu6j35pilypficznec04 https://epicgames.ent.box.com/s/s86j70iamxvsuu6j35pilypficzn... Unfortunately, a video of the talk doesn't seem to be available online.

virtualritz 7y ago

I am surprised about how biased this article is in assigning attributes like ‘good’, ‘bad’ or ‘perfect’ to Bokeh shapes. You can talk about this in these terms solely from an optical engineering pov. The shape of Bokeh is often why a lens get picked for a shot. What the author calls ‘bad Bokeh’ other people call ‘soap bubble Bokeh’ (google for it) and they are willing to cash out [2] for owning a lens that can produce this sort of thing. This is an artistic choice[1]. This article’s generic statement that this sort of Bokeh creates images where the out of focus BG areas distract from the FG/in focus motive shows a narrow understanding of how Bokeh can be used in composing an image. [1] https://www.shutterbug.com/content/creating-unique-macro-images-vintage-meyer-optik-goerlitz-%E2%80%9Csoap-bubble%E2%80%9D-lens https://www.shutterbug.com/content/creating-unique-macro-ima... [2] Caveat: I bought a Meyer Optik Trioplan 100mm f/2.8 replica on Kickstarter for this very reason: the ‘bad’ soap bubble Bokeh. I love this lens.

capn_cabbage 7y ago
Sentences 3 and 4 in the article seem to excuse this. Is there further information that I may be missing regarding why the bias is still a problem?
scarejunba 7y ago
> Two key terms in this definition are SUBJECTIVE and IMAGE. One cannot measure bokeh, as it is something that may be pleasing to one person and not another. I have my opinion of what makes for good bokeh, and, as I own this site, I get to define good and bad Bokeh for the purposes here! And every time he mentions it he uses those caveats. > You may have your own idea of what good bokeh is, but this site will be evaluating lenses based on MY opinions. And lets face it, there are actually times when BAD bokeh really works for a shot, but that is usually for people who have a whole lot more artistic talent than I do.
fireattack 7y ago
To my personal taste, the bubbles in photos of your link 1 is very distracting.
- 7y ago

nimish 7y ago

Isn't the airy disk the right PSF to use here?

kseo3l 7y ago

if bokeh gets to this point, I don't know how is it going to look in the future. Is photography going to die