depth-fog
The shot that has a behind to it. The figure standing close while the world falls back into nothing. Air you can feel sitting between the camera and everything it isn’t looking at.
demo.cinerune project.
What it’s for
Distance, the way old matte painters faked it and the way a
long lens really does it: the far hills go pale, the blacks
stop being black, and the eye reads air between you
and them. depth-fog is not a dim filter laid flat
across the frame — it reads each layer’s depth and treats
the back of the scene like atmosphere. Far layers lose contrast
and their shadows lift toward grey, so what recedes recedes
like a mountain at dusk instead of just being turned down.
This is the difference between a picture and a space. With the foreground held at full strength and everything behind it breathing haze, the frame gets a floor and a horizon — depth you can stand inside rather than a stack of flat cards. It carries the cold open where someone walks out of the murk, the establishing wide that needs weather, the portrait that wants its subject pulled forward off the wall.
Reach for this when: the scene has real depth-tagged layers and
you want them to act like they’re standing at different
distances — push amount for a whiteout that
swallows the back of the room, ease it down for a thin veil
that only just separates the planes.
Where it lives in the app
Effect group Depth & atmosphere in the effects tray, and it can be gated by a mask layer to fog only part of the frame. Unlike a flat filter it needs a depth pass to work — either Person extraction (which tags the subject as near and the rest as far) or an imported depth layer that carries per-pixel distance.
Parameters
| Key | Range | Default | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
amount | 0–1 | 0.6 | How aggressively far layers fog out (1 = blackout at max depth) |
curve | 0.3–3 | 1.3 | Shaping of depth→fog (2 = soft, favours far; 0.5 = even midground fogs) |
lift | 0–1 | 0.25 | Raises the black level so fog reads atmospheric |
Pairs well with
- Person extraction — the subject steps clean out of the haze while the room dissolves behind them. The frame says “look here” without a single light cue.
- palette quantize (cold) — push the fogged distance toward steel blue and the air turns to evening. Near things stay warm, far things go to weather.
- film grain — grain over lifted blacks is exactly how a real fog frame photographs. The haze stops looking digital and starts looking shot.
- vignette — close the corners in over the fog and the shot gets a held breath at its centre, distance falling away on every side.
Demo project
The downloadable demo.cinerune
is Cinerune’s bundled Portrait / depth demo — five
depth-tagged render layers with depth-fog applied across them.
Drop it into the editor (File → Open from disk…) to
tweak parameters live. The frame shown above is exported from
the same project.