Sweet scene!

please do not get me started when it comes to the failings of vision... lol. you seem to know far more than i about DoF within Poser. i have never bothered as i tend to do most things in my image editor since it just seems easier [more straightforward]. i think the background here works rather nicely as she is dressed so elegantly that i imagine the party must be taking place in a rather posh location, like an island, so the water makes perfect sense to me :))

Thanks, Giana! That's what I was imagining: that she's leaving a fancy party. The dress is called "Betrothed," so I suppose it might've been some kind of engagement party, but I don't like Ichiro nearly as much as I like Koshini, so I figured she might perhaps be setting out on adventures of her own :-) I also seem to prefer doing DOF with Photoshop, using a Z-depth mask channel as an input for the lens blur filter, although even with that I have to rely somewhat on my own eyes to make sure the subject remains in focus, and sometimes I mess up (as with a recent portrait of an ice fairy). At least with Photoshop you can just revert the changes (if you catch them in time!), rather than having to re-render!

All in all the scene looks great. When I first tried DOF I couldn't get the hang of it for a while. After trial and error things clicked into place. I like to use DOF to put more emphasize on the subject as a focused framing.

That's exactly what I was hoping to do: put more emphasis on the subject, so that's why I used DOF in this one. Something about her dress was just blending in to other environments I tried and not standing out, so with this fairly simple one I thought maybe the softening effect of DOF would help the dress stand out more. I'm glad it looks OK! This is actually Poser camera DOF combined with a bit of Photoshop Z-depth mask lens blur b/c Poser's wasn't quite strong enough. (But when I lowered the f-stop, it blurred the plants in a way that looked weird.) I think ultimately the issue here is that the dress is ancient :-)

Fantastic character and splendid setting! Most delightful creation! Bravo! Very cool work!

Lovely render Amy! DOF is probably the only thing I actually feel more confident about when it comes to renders but only because I am a photographer so I'm used to using it in real life too. Let's say that DOF is very useful in portraits, when you want to concentrate on the subject and not the surroundings (like poser4me said, you want the emphasis on the subject). The more the background is blurred the less "distractions" there will be in the image, the more the person will stand out. On the other hand in wide angle shots or panoramic shots it depends on how important the setting is and how artistic you want to be. Despite my experience as a photographer, it took me a bit to get a hang of it in Poser too because even though the principles are the same, it's different when you are shooting with an actual camera and lens. (But the same goes for the lights. Sometimes I just want to poke my hand through the screen and move things around lol.) The risk in adding a blurred background effect in postwork is that you might not get the gradual blur that you get when you are using a lens or using the DOF directly in Poser. I think this scene looks good both like this and even without the blur, the lovely Lady Koshini would attract the attention in any case.

Thanks for the comment, RubyTuesday! I'm not surprised that you're a photographer, given how amazing your Poser portraits are! I would imagine a photographer would have a different sensibility when it comes to using 3D cameras. I forget about things like "wide angle" and other types of shots b/c I just fiddle with camera settings until I get something I like (which often involves heavy use of the camera's perspective dial, which does all kind of weird things to the camera). I think reviewing the basics of photography shots, esp. when to use various focal lengths, apertures, etc., would probably be useful!

In my own testing, I actually kinda prefer the look of DOF I get in Photoshop over what Poser does. You probably already know how to do this, but for anyone who doesn't: I include Z-depth in the "auxiliary render data" on the Firefly settings pane and export the render as a PSD. In Photoshop, I select and copy the Z-depth mask layer, switch to channels, and paste it in a new channel, which I call Z-Depth mask. Then I switch back to layers, hide the Z-depth layer, and select the image. I apply the Lens Blur filter and choose the Z-Depth mask channel as the input. The mask creates a graduated effect, with more blur further away. I click on what I want to be the focal point, and then I fiddle with settings until it starts to look right.

That seems to offer a lot more flexibility than doing DOF in the render, esp. if I didn't get the focus_Distance thing right on the camera settings. For this image, I actually did use Poser's DOF, but it wasn't quite enough, so I added Photoshop's on top of it.

Came out great I think.

Thank you :-)

Love the dress. Wonderful work

Beautifully dressed and well posed scene!

As an amateur photographer I find DoF and focal length fascinating. I've used the Z masking technique that your used but I agree with Ruby Tuesday that with DoF you have a field of sharp focus and things become gradually more blurred as they get further from the center of that field. Poser actually does this pretty well. The other thing is if you have objects or characters in the foreground and outside of the field of sharp focus they blur a bit, too (which is irrelevant to the current image, I think >.<). I've used it during some character dialogue scenes to focus strongly on the speaker and received both rave review and a lot of criticism from Mazzam who evidently hates it. ;-D

I like that Koshini seems mature in this picture. Maybe it's her hair? Anyway, I enjoyed it and your choice of background works pretty well even though you think it could be better. There's a time when "pretty well" should do and perfection is the enemy! XD

As always, thank you for sharing!

Molly

Thanks for the comments, Molly! Learning to be OK with "pretty well" has been the major lesson of my return to Poser after a year away. I used to get so obsessed with such small things that weren't ultimately all that important for artwork I'm just making and sharing for fun, and that ultimately led to some burn out. Now I'm in the mode of having so many ideas I want to try that I'm having to let go of some of my quintuple Virgo tendencies :-)

Your choice of background & your use of DOF focuses your attention on the main character, so I'd say that you were very successful with this creation!

There's nothing wrong with this backdrop. Sometimes I get fixated on the smallest things. Like the time one actor was ~6 ft tall and the guy next to him was only 1 inch in relative scale. I just ignored it and posted it anyway.

This is delightful!!
It's hard to find a place to wear a dress like that in real life, too!!