Fast Bokeh is a free plugin for After Effects that creates a smooth DOF bokeh blur using a depth map.

Rowbyte releases a lens blur plugin for Adobe After Effects that can create depth of field bokeh effects. You might be thinking “not another lens blur plugin, isn’t there too many of those already?”. Well, you might be right, but this one is different according to Rowbyte. “Fast Bokeh is different from all the other Lens Blur plug-ins out there because it meets the three following requirements.”

Those requirements are that the plugin is very fast while still being blur radius independent, handles edges correctly (which is a point of contention for many other plugins), and one that has Gaussian blur quality. Fast Bokeh meets all there of those requirements. Also, it is worthwhile to note that it is also free to download.

One of the things that make Fast Bokeh different is that the performance only depends on the image size, not the amount of blur applied. That means that you can expect the same type of render performance pretty much in all cases.

Also, worthy of mention is that the plugin will produce no hard edges. Object boundaries get expanded with the plugin, and the object edges work as you would expect. Fast Bokeh is also 32bit enabled and creates a smooth Gaussian-like fast blur. It does this without any unique aperture shapes or chromatic aberration settings. So the plugin works consistently across all dynamic color ranges.

Get Fast Bur here — It works with After Effects CS6 and Creative Cloud. The plugin works with CC 2017, CC 2018, CC 2019. macOS 10.8 and above or Windows 7 and above. Download and extract the zip file and put the plugin files in your After Effects Plug-ins folder.

Compare these images rendered with AE’s Camera Lens Blur Effect, Frischluft’s LensCare plugin, and Fast Bokeh.