Joe’s Soft Shapes is useful for fuzzing out faces or drawing attention to specific areas of an image. Similar to Joe’s Soft Spot and Joe’s Soft Ellipse, this effect creates a multi-sided geometric shape as the foundation of the soft shape mask through which the blurred image is applied.
The original purpose of Shape Preview was to make setting up the soft effect easier by drawing an outline around the soft ellipse, but adding color, thickness, softness and opacity controls made it into an effective border control. For oval borders, see Joe’s Soft Ellipse.
Example Images
Blurring Faces
One of the most common use for Joe’s Soft Shapes is blurring out faces or logos. Keyframing the Origin value allows the fuzzy area to follow motion across a clip. The Shape Preview option can help to position the soft area on the clip.
Shape Crop and Picture in Picture
When Blur and Softness are set to zero and Mode is set to Shape Only, Joe’s Soft Shapes can be used as a multi-shape crop or PIP tool. Border color, opacity, thickness and softness are all adjustable.
Faux Focus and Depth of Field Effects
Inverting the soft area helps to focus attention on a specific area of an image by reducing detail and softening focus everywhere else.
All of these effects are also possible using Joe’s Soft Shapes, with additional shape options.
Joe’s Soft Effects
There are four different soft effects included with Joe’s Filters bringing a wide range of soft filtering to Final Cut Pro. Each plugin offers different shapes for more creative freedom.
Controls
-
Width, Height (1 - 1000)
-
Sets the size of the soft shape. These values are then affected by the Scale setting.
-
Scale (0 - 1000%)
-
Increases the size of the soft shape.
-
Origin
-
The center point of the soft shape.
-
Sides
-
Determines whether the noise changes on every frame or stays fixed for the duration of the effect.
-
Angle
-
Rotates the ellipse mask around the center point.
-
Blur
-
Blur radius used to soften the image.
-
Softness
-
Determines how soft to make the edge of the soft ellipse.
-
Invert
-
Reverses the masked area.
-
Mode, Opacity
-
Composite controls to specify how to apply the blurred image back onto the original.
Shape Preview
-
Draw Shape
-
Draws an outline around the base ellipse shape, make the frame customization settings visible.
-
Frame Color
-
Sets the color of the frame outline.
-
Frame Width
-
Sets the width of the frame outline.
-
Frame Softness
-
Softens the frame outline. If this value is higher than the frame width the frame might become invisible from excessive blurring.
-
Frame Opacity
-
Sets the opacity of the frame outline.
Feeds