Soft focus

This article is about the term used in photography and optics. For other uses, see Soft Focus (disambiguation).

Example using Canon EF 135 mm f/2.8 Soft Focus
A glass bottle with a green bottlecap; the lens has applied a heavy soft focus effect, resulting in halation around highlights and a hazy, dreamy texture.
An image of a bottle with a heavy soft focus effect.
The same glass bottle with a green bottlecap; in this case, the lens has applied no soft focus effect, resulting in a normal, sharp texture.
An image of the same bottle, but without soft focus.

In photography, soft focus is a lens flaw, in which the lens forms images that are blurred due to uncorrected spherical aberration. A soft focus lens deliberately introduces spherical aberration which blurs fine texture in the image while retaining sharp edges across areas of high contrast; it is not the same as an out-of-focus image, and the effect cannot be achieved simply by defocusing a sharp lens. Soft focus is also the name of the style of photograph produced by such a lens.