Bokeh rendering simulates the shallow depth-of-field effect in photography, enhancing visual aesthetics and guiding viewer attention to regions of interest. Although recent approaches perform well, rendering controllable bokeh without additional depth inputs remains a significant challenge. Existing classical and neural controllable methods rely on accurate depth maps, while generative approaches often struggle with limited controllability and efficiency. In this paper, we propose BokehFlow, a depth-free framework for controllable bokeh rendering based on flow matching. BokehFlow directly synthesizes photorealistic bokeh effects from all-in-focus images, eliminating the need for depth inputs. It employs a cross-attention mechanism to enable semantic control over both focus regions and blur intensity via text prompts. To support training and evaluation, we collect and synthesize four datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BokehFlow achieves visually compelling bokeh effects and offers precise control, outperforming existing depth-dependent and generative methods in both rendering quality and efficiency.

Bokeh is used in photography to emphasize the selected subject by smoothly blurring the out-of-focus region with appealing highlights. While recent advances have achieved impressive results in rendering realistic blur, existing frameworks typically rely on disparity maps and bokeh-relevant inputs (e.g., focal distance and blur size), and face significant challenges in video bokeh rendering due to limited temporal consistency. In this paper, we propose BokehCrafter, the first video diffusion framework that generates temporally coherent and visually pleasing bokeh effects from all-in-focus video inputs under user-friendly input conditions. Specifically, we leverage a dual-stream attention mechanism, integrating a reference image branch and a rendering instruction branch. We propose a Bokeh Image Extraction (BIE) module and a CLIP-based text encoder to extract image and text features, respectively, whose outputs are fused via a Text-Image Fusion (TIF) module to enable fine-grained and controllable bokeh rendering. To support the novel capabilities of our model, we construct Video Bokeh Scenes (VBS), a large-scale dataset containing a wide variety of bokeh videos with corresponding rendering instructions, across various scenes and rendering settings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both bokeh rendering quality and temporal consistency.

Bokeh is a wide-aperture optical effect that creates aesthetic blurring in photography. However, achieving this effect typically demands expensive professional equipment and expertise. To make such cinematic techniques more accessible, bokeh rendering aims to generate the desired bokeh effects from all-in-focus inputs captured by smartphones. Previous efforts in bokeh rendering primarily focus on static images. However, when extended to video inputs, these methods exhibit flicker and artifacts due to a lack of temporal consistency modeling. Meanwhile, they cannot utilize information like occluded objects from adjacent frames, which are necessary for bokeh rendering. Moreover, the difficulties of capturing all-in-focus and bokeh video pairs result in a shortage of data for training video bokeh models. To tackle these challenges, we propose the Video Bokeh Renderer (VBR), the model designed specifically for video bokeh rendering.VBR leverages implicit feature space alignment and aggregation to model temporal consistency and exploit complementary information from adjacent frames. On the data front, we introduce the first Synthetic Video Bokeh (SVB) dataset, synthesizing authentic bokeh effects using ray-tracing techniques. Furthermore, to improve the robustness of the model to inaccurate disparity maps, we employ a set of augmentation strategies to simulate corrupted disparity inputs during training. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.