How to add BOKEH to a photo and BLUR BACKGROUND in photoshop tutorial

 

Credit by : photoshopCAFE

How to Add Bokeh to a Photo and Blur Background in Photoshop Tutorial Hey, it's Colin Smith here from PhotoshopCAFE and welcome to this week's episode. What I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how to create that soft dreamy backgroundwith this photograph. So we got a little bit of these little circles going on which is known as bokeh, but I'mgoing to make it much more pronounced and much more romantic. So, this is the kind of thing that usually would be achieved by using a very shallowdepth of field and a very wide open aperture on the camera. So here we got a photograph. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to cut these people out, and then, there'sa little trick I'm going to show you so we don't get the fringing around the edges which usually happens when you blur the background, and then, we're going to create this aftereffect. So why don't we start off by just cutting them out quickly and we can just use the Quick Select Tool to do that. So I'm just going to grab that Quick Select Tool right now and just go around here. And I'm not going to get into all the details of cutting this out. I'm just going to show you how I do it right here, but I have other tutorials that I'll link to you on how to cut out the background where I spend more time on it. So I'm just hitting the Alt key or the Option key just going around here. I want to make sure we don't get this bit in the middle, just very gently going in there. One of the things, I'm using a Pen. We can go down here. We can turn size to pen pressure if you want to because I'm using a Waco pressure sensitive pen here, and it's got a little bit of trouble getting in there. So what we do is just make it smaller, and that's with the left bracket key, so we can get in there, and it's looking pretty good. So I just want to check my selection here, so I'm just going to hit the Q for Quick Mask,and that's actually looking not bad at all. And I'm just going to choose the Select a Mask right now, and I'll give it a little bit of radiance just to make it look better, clean it up a little bit. There we go. That's not bad, and then, we just want to copy this one out to a new layer with a layer mask, so we're just going to click here. All right, so there we go. We've got them cut out and we can see this as the background. So here's the thing that happens, if I was just to blur this background, I'll show you something here, and this can be a problem a lot of the time. When people do that simple blurring of the background like this, notice when I do that,see this fringing we get around the edges there?See how soft, you can see it's almost like a halo effect or a doubling effect there. And what's happening is because these pixels there that we can see are being blurred. You can specially see it there. So that's one of the things we kind of want to avoid that, so I'm just going to hit the Cancel right there and let me just make that fit, all right. So what we can do to eliminate this problem is now that we've created this mask, Ctrlclick on that mask makes that selection. Now, sometimes I might expand this by pixel or what I'm going to do, in this case, I'm just going to Select, Modify, and I am going to expand this by 1 pixel, and then, I'm going to choose Select, Modify, and then, we're going to feather it by 1 pixel. So this is just creating a softer edge than just that hard edge. And, now, I'm just going to use Content Aware Fill. Now it doesn't have to be perfect. Let me hide the top layer so you can see it. So I'm going to hit the Shift Delete on Mac, and that would be Shift Backspace on Windows,to bring up the Fill dialogue box. Go down, make sure you select Content Aware, and then, just click okay. And it's just going to do a Ctrl D to turn it off. You can see we got this kind of ghosting [inaudible 00:03:33], but that's all we need, just tomake sure we don't get those colors around the edges which you're going to bleed in whence blur it later on. All right, so let's turn that layer on top. We're almost there. Now, what we want to do now is we want to create a soft blurred background, but we want to really enhance this bokeh in the back here that comes from the lens, and that gives itthat really nice romantic look. And that also makes it look like it was shot with a much more expensive lens. So let's make sure the background is selected, then we're going to choose Filter, then we're going to go down to the Blur Gallery. So we're doing this here inside of Photoshop CC. Now, the Blur Gallery was in CS6, but if you have an earlier version, just use the Blur,a Gaussian Blur, and you're going to pretty much have to leave it at that. But what we're going to do is we're going to go here. We're going to go to the Field Blur, so we're going Filter, Blur Gallery, Field Blur, and this is where we create a depth of field effect by applying two points here. But what we're going to do is we're just going to keep this single point there and just creates blur. So, right now, we're at about a 15 blur and we really want to bring this out. So it takes a little bit of practice to kind of play around and get it right, so we're going to move some things around. So we're going to start with Light Bokeh and we're just going to move it up a little bituntil we start to see some of that bokeh effect. Okay, it's starting to happen, but it's not very clean yet. This is not what we want. So what we're going to do is play around with the Light Range. Notice as we increase this, this just makes everything kind of blow out, which is kindof cool for certain things, but we don't want to do too much of that. We're going to actually clamp it down here, and so we bring the white in. I'm kind of liking it about there. Let me bring the black a bit more and, sometimes, you're going to have to have these almost on top of each other to get the effect we're looking for. In fact, why don't we just do that right now, and we're just going to adjust the amount of blur. Okay, it's not quite happening yet. Let's increase the amount of bokeh. See, now, it's starting to pop. See how we can see these little bits of bokeh are starting to pop now. So let's increase the blur; there we go, and see what we're doing there. We're getting these beautiful, nice, kind of like blurred effects, so I'm just goingto stop at about there. And you can see we got this nice bokeh. Let's play around a little bit more, maybe increase it a bit more. There we go. That's not bad. And as you can see, we can play around with these settings here and let's bring that downa little bit. And so what it is now is just really a balancing act of just playing around with the difference between how much Booker we're going to get, the light range settings here, and make sure that those are pretty much on top of each other to make it work as two triangles. And then we just play around with the amount of blur there to, you know, get bigger thereabout or smaller bokeh about there. But, now, we've got them just dialed them beautifully. So maybe we're going to go about that size here, maybe down a little bit. There we go. And you can see we've kind of dialed this in right now. Now, the other thing we can do is we can add some color in here and see how that would just add different types of colors, but in this case, we really don't want that because it's not very natural because it's pretty much just one kind going in there, and I would just going to click okay. And then, if we'll look at this here is our top layer. When we hide it, there's our background. Notice it's beautiful and seamless because we used that Content Aware Fill, then we dropped our couple on there and notice there's no fringing or anything around there, and so we've been able to create that effect just like that. So if we'll look at it before and after, you can see how much more dreamy and romantic this photograph is. So I hope you enjoyed this. If you did, hit the Subscribe button and become part of the Cafe crew and I'll give you anew tutorial every single week. Don't forget to hit the Like button and, also, add a comment, and until next time, I'll seeyou at the Cafe.