DoF Focus
I saw a post in my feed just about someone having problems with focusing DoF in ReShade. They’ve deleted their post now because they found an answer, but I’d written a reply so I figured it useful to share. It won’t make perfect sense because it was relating specifically to pictures they’d posted, but you should be able to follow the gist of it.
Summary of the problem: when the camera was pointing at a sim’s chest the background would be blurred, but when the camera was moved up to the sim’s face the background would be in focus and the blur was lost.
Okay so what you need to sort out is the focus. What’s happening is the point at which ReShade is looking for the focus changes as you move the camera.
For example, if you have non-mouse-driven auto-focus enabled and you have it set at screen coordinates 0.5, 0.5 that means whatever is directly in the centre of the screen will always be in focus, and whatever falls behind that (behind in terms of depth) point will be blurred.
So, his chest is quite a large target, and his face is a smaller target. Depending on where you have focus set to, it sounds like it could be just missing his face. The focus coordinates are falling on the background instead, meaning the background will be sharp and in focus.
A more specific example using your pictures: if the focus coordinates are set to 0.2, 0.4 then in the first picture that point falls around his right shoulder, meaning that’s the focus point and anything behind it will be blurred. But when you move the camera so his face is in view, 0.2, 0.4 now falls on the background, not on his face (the middle of his face would be something like 0.4, 0.6 - looking carefully, 0.5, 0.5 (which is default) might just be missing his neck at the place where it curves in).
You often have to experiment with different coordinates on a per-shot basis to get the right focus depending on where your subject is. You can enable mouse-driven auto-focus to make this a lot easier. As the name suggests, anywhere you point your mouse will be the subject of focus.
Personally I use manual focus and set the distances more accurately that way. It doesn’t rely on knowing the x, y coordinates of your subject, and only takes depth into consideration. (I can’t use mouse-driven auto-focus because I hotsample, but that’s by-the-by.)