For those who don’t know the tool: Boris FX Sapphire is a multi host VFX plug-in suite for editors and compositors, used in After Effects, Premiere, Media Composer, and OpenFX hosts like Resolve, Flame, and Nuke.
Defocus that tries to behave like glass
Boris FX ships Sapphire 2026.5 with a new effect called Advanced Defocus, built to recreate lens blur character rather than just blur pixels. In Sapphire, artists can start from presets, including ones built from real-world lens references and more stylised options, then dial in Defocus Width plus relative width and height for anamorphic style stretching.
Advanced Defocus focuses on the lens kernel, where artists shape bokeh as circles, polygons with adjustable sides and roundness, or custom shapes. It also includes controls to introduce imperfections tied to aperture blades, such as adjustable blade notches, as well as options for colour fringing and noise. The tool targets everything from cheap, dirty glass to high-end primes, depending on how far you push those controls.
The lens vignette section adds classic edge darkening, but also an optcial vignette control that changes distortion toward the frame edges. A Matte Box control goes past soft cropping by simulating uneven light entry, slightly darkening one side while also clipping individual defocused highlights.
From grungy to clean
Advanced Defocus also includes lens textures that break up overly uniform bokeh, with parameters that range from subtle variation to grungy lens looks. Extra controls include highlight boosting, chromatic-style fringing, and grain management to match the foreground and background.
In Adobe After Effects, Advanced Defocus appears under Effect in the Sapphire Blur plus Sharpen category. The effect can work as a straight lens emulation pass, a stylised motion graphics treatment, or a transition building block. A workflow shown in Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve Fusion uses Advanced Defocus to soften a keyed background for more believable depth, then adds sensor-style grain to help match elements. Another workflow in After Effects links defocus controls across layers, uses Affect Alpha to defocus type with the background, and offsets values to keep the illusion that typography sits closer to camera.
For edits, Advanced Defocus can also drive transitions inside VEGAS Pro by building an S Transition in the Sapphire Builder variant designed for transitions. That approach ties animation to the transition length on the timeline rather than keyframing, and then applies the same peak values to both incoming and outgoing clips.
Glare gets a rebuild, and flares get louder
Sapphire 2026.5 reworks S_Glare with smoother rendering, richer spectral color, and updated parameters including highlight isolation, cleaner rays, and more natural falloff, plus new styles that widen the look range beyond traditional glare.
In Adobe After Effects, S_Glare sits under the Lighting category and behaves the same across Sapphire hosts. The first control to touch is Threshold: raise it for fewer glares, lower it for more, and expect wildly different results depending on the footage. Sapphire 2026.5 also changes what the defaults look like compared with older versions, so the same effect can start from a different baseline than legacy installs.
Presets matter a lot for S_Glare, but the preview can mislead. Results change with viewer zoom level, so checking at 100 percent gives a more reliable read before you commit. Presets also store Threshold, so loading a preset often means rebalancing Threshold right away to avoid either nothing happening or everything exploding.
If glares drift or slip onto areas you do not want, Threshold Blur becomes the other big lever. Lowering Threshold Blur picks up many more points of interest, which can reduce slippage but may add jitter. A practical balancing rule shown here is: when Blur comes down, Threshold goes up, then you fine-tune from there.
Sapphire includes integrated Mocha inside the effect for masking control. A workflow shown here uses an object brush and Mask ML to generate a mask, then inverts the Mocha mask so glare stays in the scene but stops emanating from a subject.
S_Glare also appears as an embedded component in S_NightSky, where you can open the glare editor, load glare presets, and adjust glare size to customise the look directly within the NightSky effect.
Procedural ridges, more presets, faster stacking
A new Texture Ridges effect generates ridge-like patterns from noise, with controls for octave scaling, speed, frequency, contrast, and layering to build animated surface detail and abstract motion design textures. Sapphire 2026.5 also adds more than 100 new and improved presets, including anime, sci-fi, and abstract fractal motion graphics looks.
Effect Builder gets an interface update aimed at faster custom effect and transition creation, plus new built-in Dots and Noise tools. If you build stacks for repeatable looks, this is the part worth a quiet test session before you let it touch client shots.
Pricing and updates
Sapphire ships as a plug-in collection with subscriptions, upgrade and support plans, and perpetual licenses. Subscriptions start at 545 US dollars per year or 80 US dollars per month. Customers with current Sapphire or Boris FX Suite subscriptions, or with Sapphire upgrade and support plans, get the 2026.5 release obviously as a free update. If you aren’t sure: get the free Trialversion. As always, test new tools and presets in your own pipeline before you rely on them in production.
https://borisfx.com/products/sapphire/#whats-new
