SmoothKit (After Effects)

SmoothKit allows you to blur without blurring over edges, sharpen with much less ringing, intelligently reduce small image defects, reduce jaggies, blur with per-pixel direction control, and z-blur using greyscale depth images. Many plugins have per-pixel controls, allowing you to vary the amount of blur or the direction of the blur, and many other controls, at each pixel.

As an example, with SmoothKit you can smooth out the skin in someone's face but not eliminate the details of the hair that hangs in front of the face. In addition to 'effects', the SmoothKit toolset can be used to reduce image defects in a much more intelligent manner.

Features of SmoothKit

• Ability to selectively filter the luminance, or the chrominance, or each of the RGB channels independently.
• Soften areas while preserving sharp edges.
• Sharpen plugin with a 'multi-res' mode that significantly reduces usual sharpening ringing artifacts.
• Optional grayscale images may be used to scale filters on a pixel-by-pixel basis.
• Includes a jaggie-reducing filter, to help eliminate staircasing.
• Median filter option (in the Diffusion plugin) that produces much less blocky results than regular median filters.
• Intelligently reduces block artifacts (for example, DV or MPEG compressed footage).
• Ability to soften areas without blurring edges.
• Directional filtering with per-pixel direction and strength controls.
• Ability to use splines to control the direction of the blur at each pixel (After Effects and combustion only).
• Multi-frame (temporal) filtering with several processing modes.
• Z-blur that uses depth maps for blurring control. Ability to change where the focal point should be.
• 8 and 16 bits per channel processing (only 8 bits per channel supported within Final Cut Pro). Floating point image support in After Effects 7.0 or later.
• Optimization to take advantage of After Effects's region-of-interest and other smart rectangle processing.
• Better multiprocessing support.