Deconstructing Blur, Mist, and Unsharp Mask Operations

Texture Management Part 3 – The Other side of Sharpening

Previously in this series, we summed up:

• What is Texture?
• What are the tools for manipulating texture through sharpening?
• How do those tools affect our pixels when we sharpen our images in different ways?

Now, it’s time to check out the other & equally important type of manipulating textures in video – softening/blurring using blur, mist and unsharp mask tools.

Understanding blur, mist, and unsharp mask

In this Insight, you learn how blurs affect our pixels and what are the different types of blurs available in DaVinci Resolve. In the last part of this Insight, we use blur to construct our own texture manipulation tool/node tree.

One key point, that’s perhaps even more true with softening than with sharpening, these blur operations are usually isolated. It is uncommon to blur/soften an entire image. Blur controls are also often incorporated as subsets of larger tools or plugins.

For example, noise reduction and face refinement/beauty workflows often incorporate blur controls into the tools themselves.  Both of these operations will be discussed later on in this series.