#dof tips

I’ll take the second problem first: the game has its own rudimentary type of DoF. It’s not great, but it’s there to hide the flat, low detail textures of the backdrops. There are mods that will let you turn it off, or you can turn it off yourself (which is what I do). 

Go into your Bin folder, and open up graphicsrules.sgr in a text editor (preferably one that makes it easy to ready stuff -- I use Notepad++).

Press ctrl+f in Notepad++ (I’m guessing most editors have a similar search function) and type in DofEnabled and press Find Next. 

It will take you to a section that begins ‘option LightingQuality’, with sub-sections for each level of graphics quality (Low, Medium, High, Very High). Find the sub-section that corresponds to the quality you have set in the game. You’ll see a line that says ‘prop $ConfigGroup DofEnabled true’ -- change the true to false and save.

If you’re not sure which sub-section is the right one, change #prop $ConfigGroup DofEnabled true’ to false in all of them.

Fun fact: a few lines above that is ‘prop $ConfigGroup SsaoEnabled true’. This is what you edit to get rid of the game’s atrocious ambient occlusion (their very bad version of mxao). If you set this line to false it will get rid of their bad ao, but it will also disable DoF, so you don’t have to change the DofEnabled line as well. I only turn off the Ssao line and it switches off them both. Two birds, one stone.

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Back to the first question: I’m going to assume you have the depth buffer set up correctly. So we need to look at your focusing method in the DoF shader.

A lot of people tick the auto-focus and mouse-driven auto-focus boxes, because it makes it easy to focus. With these two options checked, wherever you point your mouse will be in focus, and everything behind it will start to become blurred. I don’t use that method because it doesn’t work with SRWE (if you don’t know what SRWE is don’t worry about this, it doesn’t apply to your question) so I don’t have it set up like that. I left it set up with manual focus.

If you want to continue using manual focus, the settings you  need to control where the focus lies are primarily the manual focus depth and near and far blur curves. 

The manual focus depth is where the focus should be. So, imagine you standing with a camera, you’re at 0.000. Look into the far distance and imagine the sky is a big cardboard backdrop way back there: that’s 1.000. Everything in between falls somewhere along the distance between 0.000 and 1.000. If you want to have the sharpest focus be on a tree that is approximately 20% of the way in front of you, you would want to set the manual focus depth as 0.200.

Most of the close portraits I take have the manual depth set at around 0.020-0.040. 

Near blur curve and far blur curve determine how softly or sharply the blur starts in front of and behind your focus point. Higher numbers mean the blur starts much more softly and further away from the focus point. Smaller numbers mean the blur starts much more sharply (or abruptly) and closer to the focus point.

I leave near blur curve set at its maximum because I don’t think the regular DoF shader handles near blur very well (near blur means blur in between you and your focus point). If you want good near blur look at the Cinematic DoF shader instead.

I generally leave far blur curve set at its default, but for some wide landscape shots where I just want a gentle blur in the distance I will increase it so there isn’t an obvious line where the blur begins. Far blur is the blur that falls behind your focus point, in between it and the backdrop.

I’m assuming this is your first time using dof? 

First of all, follow this tutorial to set up the depth buffer correctly.

Out of the box dof is usually set up to use auto-focus (and from what I can gather a lot of preset makers leave it like that). When you scroll down to the dof shader in the bottom pane is auto-focus turned on? And is mouse-driven auto-focus also turned on? If yes, then the camera will focus wherever you position your mouse in the game, and whatever is at that point will be in focus.

You can get finer control by turning auto-focus off and using manual focus, but if this is your first time using dof, and as long as you don’t hotsample using srwe, you’re probably best leaving it set to auto-focus.

You can adjust how sharply/softly the blurry areas appear with the far plane and near plane settings. Far plane affects everything further away into the distance than whatever is in focus, and near plane affects everything closer to you than whatever is in focus.

You can adjust the strength of the blur using the blur radius setting. Lower numbers mean less blur, and higher numbers mean more blur.

That covers the basics. If you want to change things relating to how the blur/bokeh looks you need to scroll down and use some of the other settings, but I recommend leaving that for now until you’re more familiar with using dof as it’s already set up.

It looks like he still hasn’t added mouse-driven af into the qUINT version (someone asked for it to be included and he said he might, but...) so it won’t be possible.

I use manual focusing, which I find it be easier than auto-focus (without it being mouse-driven). 

With manual focusing what you’re doing is setting the focus plane, rather than a spot in the centre (or wherever) of the screen at which to determine the focus point. It means that if you manually set the focus plane to be at a distance of 0.4 it will always be at that distance, regardless of what gets in the way.

You do still have to change that focus plane distance a lot, but I find it less annoying and more precise than using the auto-focus coordinates. 

If I am taking a lot of portraits or gameplay scene shots I often find I keep it at between 0.1 and 0.4, but for landscape shots where I want just a little blur in the far distance I will sometimes crank it up higher, in conjunction with the far plane blur value.

I saw a post in my feed just about someone having problems with focusing DoF in ReShade. They’ve deleted their post now because they found an answer, but I’d written a reply so I figured it useful to share. It won’t make perfect sense because it was relating specifically to pictures they’d posted, but you should be able to follow the gist of it.

Summary of the problem: when the camera was pointing at a sim’s chest the background would be blurred, but when the camera was moved up to the sim’s face the background would be in focus and the blur was lost.

Okay so what you need to sort out is the focus. What’s happening is the point at which ReShade is looking for the focus changes as you move the camera.

For example, if you have non-mouse-driven auto-focus enabled and you have it set at screen coordinates 0.5, 0.5 that means whatever is directly in the centre of the screen will always be in focus, and whatever falls behind that (behind in terms of depth) point will be blurred.

So, his chest is quite a large target, and his face is a smaller target. Depending on where you have focus set to, it sounds like it could be just missing his face. The focus coordinates are falling on the background instead, meaning the background will be sharp and in focus.

A more specific example using your pictures: if the focus coordinates are set to 0.2, 0.4 then in the first picture that point falls around his right shoulder, meaning that’s the focus point and anything behind it will be blurred. But when you move the camera so his face is in view, 0.2, 0.4 now falls on the background, not on his face (the middle of his face would be something like 0.4, 0.6 - looking carefully, 0.5, 0.5 (which is default) might just be missing his neck at the place where it curves in).

You often have to experiment with different coordinates on a per-shot basis to get the right focus depending on where your subject is. You can enable mouse-driven auto-focus to make this a lot easier. As the name suggests, anywhere you point your mouse will be the subject of focus.