From the course: Documentary Photo Techniques with Photoshop and After Effects
Join today to access over 22,600 courses taught by industry experts.
Creating a Lens Blur effect
From the course: Documentary Photo Techniques with Photoshop and After Effects
Creating a Lens Blur effect
- Photoshop offers a very useful camera blur effect that allows you to target an area and create a realistic blur that looks like it happened in-camera. This could be useful for removing distracting background objects or de-emphasizing areas in the photo. Let's open up this image here. And this is the pier in Huntington Beach. And there's a lot of activity going on in the background. What I want to do is minimize that. So to start, I need to create an alpha channel to define the different areas of the picture. So I'll go to Channels, and click on New. Now, what we can do here is use the Gradient tool to go from white to black. There it is. I'll put this into Normal mode to start, and just draw. And you see that it creates a gradual blend, allowing us to determine what's in focus and what's not. Well, let's go off of this upright pole here, put a little bit of a blend there. It looks pretty good, but I'd like to make sure that some of these foreground objects stay sharp. So with the…
Practice while you learn with exercise files
Download the files the instructor uses to teach the course. Follow along and learn by watching, listening and practicing.
Download courses and learn on the go
Watch courses on your mobile device without an internet connection. Download courses using your iOS or Android LinkedIn Learning app.