Joe's Filters: Joe's Soft Shapes

The Joe's Soft Shapes plugin is a part of Joe's Filters, shareware utility and image processing effects for Final Cut Pro.

What it does

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

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.

When Blur and Softness are set to zero and Mode is set to Shape Only, Joe's Soft Ellipse can be used as a multi-shape crop or PIP tool. Border color, opacity, thickness and softness are all adjustable.

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 the above effects are also possible with Joe's Soft Ellipse, using a smooth edged elipse.

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's offers different shapes for more creative freedom

Joe's Soft Ellipse

Joe's Soft Gradients

Joe's Soft Shapes

Joe's Soft Spot

The 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.

• 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.