Increasing the background blur in macro photography – part 3/3
This post is part of a 3 part series on how to use the Gaussian Blur filter in Photoshop to perform various photo touch-ups. In this post you will learn how to increase the effect of a background blur in macro photography.
All three parts will be available at the following links:
Part 1 – Creating the Soft Blur Effect
Part 2 – Silky smooth skin in photoshop
Part 3 – Increasing the background blur in macro photography
Disclaimer: Before I begin on this tutorial I should first explain why you would want to use this tutorial.First of all if you are an experienced photographer you can achieve this effect with your camera and probably don’t need this tuturial. The typical macro shot contains an object in the foreground with a very short depth of field. As a result of the very narrow depth of field the background ends up being blurred. A trained photographer can easily accomplish this task but for a beginner or someone with a typical point an shoot camera you don’t always achieve the exact intended result. Also macro lenses can be expensive. Luckily theres a way for you to compensate for your lack of camera skill or quality camera with a quick photoshop trick.
Here you can see the original image as you can see the main focus is the bear itself and its eyes and the background is only slightly blurred. In this tutorial we are going to increase the amount of blur applied to this background.
First step as always is to duplicate the original layer so that you have something to work with with out messing up your original. Right click on the background layer and select duplicate layer. Name this new layer blurred background.
With the Blurred Background selected go to the top menu and select Filter-> Blur -> Gaussian Blur.
Now apply a blur filter on this layer. The amount of blur will depend on your image and its resolution. Anywhere from 3-10pixels should give you quite a significant amount of blur.
Now we are going to create a vector mask so that we can apply the blur effect just to the background and not the whole image. With the new layer selected click on the add new layer mask icon from the layers window.
For the next step ensure that you have the vector mask on the blurred background layer selected. This is a common mistake that people make so ensure you have the correct part of the layer selected. You should see a box outlining the vector mask like so.
There are two options you have next. Depending on the scale of your foreground Item you can either paint that item in black to remove the blur or fill the mask with black and then pain the background where you would like to blur in white. Either way you go you sure use a large fuzzy brush to paint softly around the edges of your foreground object. When you are done the mask should be black where you would like the image to show through to the sharp image bellow and white where you want it to be blurry. If you find that your gaussian blur effect was too strong you could reduce the opacity of the mask layer until it meets your liking.
Here we have the finished product image.
[...] All three parts will be available at the following links: Part 1 – Creating the Soft Blur Effect Part 2 – Silky smooth skin in photoshop Part 3 – Increasing the background blur in macro photography [...]
[...] All three parts will be available at the following links: Part 1 – Creating the Soft Blur Effect Part 2 – Silky smooth skin in photoshop Part 3 – Increasing the background blur in macro photography [...]