Handheld magnifiers are ideal for people with conditions such as macular degeneration, glaucoma, or diabetic retinopathy, where detailed tasks like reading are difficult.

Magnifying glass

Let’s check out the Tracker’s Y-translate knob in the Curve Editor. Even though we pre-blurred our crunched image, there’s still a lot of jitter, and our values range from -10 to 0.5. Plugging that into a Defocus node won’t help.

Hands freemagnifiersfor visually impaired

At New England Low Vision and Blindness, we offer a comprehensive range of handheld magnifiers designed to enhance visual clarity for those with low vision. These compact devices provide an easy-to-use solution for magnifying small text or objects, making everyday tasks such as reading labels, books, or newspapers more manageable. Our selection includes magnifiers of various strengths and designs, catering to individual needs and preferences. Explore how our handheld magnifiers can help improve your quality of life by providing the extra visual assistance you need to maintain independence.

By removing all the mid-tones from the image, we’re forcibly creating an edge that travels without our plate’s rack focus. We can track this!

Compositing CG renders into a plate with a rack focus can sometimes be tricky to get right. However, your defocus has to match perfectly, otherwise the illusion falls apart! Manually creating keyframes and adjusting curve slopes can be a bit cumbersome, so I thought there had to be a better way to approach this. In this tutorial, I will share what I came up with!

We can learn a lot about what our CG needs by taking cues from our plate, and matching defocus is no exception. We can look at the size of our plate’s bokeh shapes, or how soft high-contrast edges are for reference. Animating a rack focus is a natural extension of this!

To start, we want to find a contrasty area in the plate. There are a handful of spec highlights we could use, but not all plates have this much detail, so let’s make life a bit more difficult for ourselves and use the wooden spoon and cutting board against the back wall, screen-left. We’ll need to stabilize this area to isolate the rack focus’ motion, which looks like this:

Best Magnifying Glass with light for reading

Handheldmagnifier for low vision

Because there’s MPEG artifacts in the plate, it’s going to be pretty noisy, so let’s add a small blur before the saturation to ensure our track isn’t too jittery.

At New England Low Vision and Blindness, we offer a comprehensive range of handheld magnifiers designed to enhance visual clarity for those with low vision. These compact devices provide an easy-to-use solution for magnifying small text or objects, making everyday tasks such as reading labels, books, or newspapers more manageable. Our selection includes magnifiers of various strengths and designs, catering to individual needs and preferences. Explore how our handheld magnifiers can help improve your quality of life by providing the extra visual assistance you need to maintain independence.

The above image is what we get out of the box — unsurprisingly no defocus. But if we match the defocus levels using bm_CurveRemapper’s New Minimum & New Maximum knobs on the most-defocused & least-defocused frames, everything in between will animate as expected!

BestHandheldmagnifying glass with Light

Looking at the blue channel and boosting the contrast (pictured above) shows us a fairly defined hard inner-edge & soft outer-edge, which contracts as the BG shifts to be more in focus. We need to find a way to analyze this data… While we can’t track the change in size of an edge, we can track position, so let’s desaturate and crunch the image to within an inch of it’s life.

It’s important to keep in mind that this technique is not a silver bullet. Sometimes it might just work, other times you may need to tweak the animation curves to get a perfect result. Ultimately, it’s a great starting point to save some time!

Hand held Magnifier with Light

While handheld magnifiers are excellent for quick tasks like reading short text or examining details, desktop magnifiers may be better for extended use.

Handheld magnifiers are portable devices used to magnify small print or objects, making them easier to see for individuals with low vision.

Some handheld magnifiers come with built-in LED lights, requiring batteries for illumination. Non-illuminated options are also available.

We can smooth our Track in the tracker itself — handy! However, tread as lightly as you can with this, as the more you smooth the curve, the less fidelity you will have in your matched rack focus.

Before we play with this too much, let’s expression-link bm_CurveRemapper’s Output knob to a Defocus node, add the defocus to an element, and do a simple A over B comp.

It's best to consult with a low vision specialist at New England Low Vision and Blindness who can recommend the most appropriate device based on your specific condition and needs. Our team will work to understand your goals and objectives and recommend an in-person technology assessment either in our technology center in Worcester, MA or in your home.  A comprehensive assessment allows us to work with you to identify how you will use the technology, ensure the right fit, and offer you a first-hand experience prior to making any purchase.  Experience has shown this leads to the most effective outcomes and the highest satisfaction.