From the course: Video Gear

Defocusing backgrounds in Photoshop CC

From the course: Video Gear

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Defocusing backgrounds in Photoshop CC

- Alright Rob, you know my feelings about Photoshop. It's my first love when it comes to software. - I think you have already booked your Photoshop world trip for the next ten years in a row. Yeah, absolutely. - Yes, I love Photoshop, and I love what I can do with focus in Photoshop. So, you mentioned doing some stuff here. We already opened a still earlier, but a lot of people don't realize you can actually bring video files into Photoshop. That easy, just drag it on there and it's going to open it up. - Yeah, of course, and this is kind of one of those hidden things that's not so hidden to users like you who know about Photoshop, but I think it will surprise a lot of editors and camera people. But, yes, you can in fact work with video in Photoshop. So you know Rich, one of the things that I've been playing a lot with in Photoshop is the blur gallery. For me anyway, it's given me a lot of creative inspiration about how to selectively blur a background plate out and blur shots so I can sort of target my viewer's attention. And there's a lot of presets with the blur gallery, but the cool thing about the blur gallery is you can start with a preset and then you can tweak it to match the plate that you're working on. - [Rich] Alright, so we have a still open here in Photoshop. I like to work with Smart Filters, so I'll convert that to Smart Filters so we work non-destructively, and then, from the Blur Gallery there's a bunch of options. Let's just show one of these here, called Field Blur, which is really simple. It allows you to click and add a point. So I could say, oh up here, make that a little less defocused,but back here, let's make that more defocused. - [Rob] Now obviously you're starting with an image that is a little bit blurry to begin with, but now you're almost getting into almost a tilt-shift kind of look. And there's a tilt-shift blur, but by being able to add these points, you can really selectively kind of shape or almost draw that blur path. - [Rich] Yes, so what we did there was we left that a little bit more in focus. And you know, you bring up a valid point. Let's say you didn't shoot the plates defocused. Let's say they were perfectly in focus, like this shot here. Well, when we bring that in, you can still use these pretty effectively to defocus that. So Convert for Smart Filters, and we'll go with that Field Blur, and we can just say, ok, this point back here. - [Rob] Really blurry. - [Rich] Really blurry. This foreground here? Not so blurry. - [Rob] Yes, and obviously you can play with how they kind of meet up and align with each other. - [Rich] Yes. And so that's the idea of the field blur. If you don't want to use field blur, though, you do have a tilt-shift, which is quite nice. So if you take a look at that, it allows you to say, ok, this area here is in focus, and as it gets to the edges, have that sort of fall off. - [Rob] And it just fall, and you can kind of create the same things with the field blur versus the tilt-shift. It's a little bit a matter of preference. One of the ones that I've been using quite a bit is the iris blur. The Iris blur, to me, feels very camera-friendly, right? It feels kind of like how I would do it in a camera. - [Rich] Yes. - [Rob] And that's a pretty good way of working as well. - [Rich] So let's just switch over to that video shot. And this particular video is bigger. I shot this at 1080. We do have a little bleed through on the left edge here, but lets see if just defocusing that won't solve it. So, same thing, Convert for Smart Filters, and then choose Blur Gallery, and you were suggesting the Iris Blur, right? - [Rob] . Yes, exactly. So the iris blur, because it almost looks like the end of a camera, you know, this circle, I can obviously adjust the size of it. And this, to me, as a colorist and the tools that I work in, this is very much like a traditional vignette, or a window, or a shape that I would kind of play around. I can adjust sort of the roundness of it, and the blur, and the falloff, which kind of gives me a more comfortable feel. But again, all of these kind of let you do really creative things. - [Rich] And this, people I hope realize they can rotate that if needed. And here's my favorite. You could pull these pins in and out for the transition. Most people don't know if you hold down the alt key, or the option key, yes, we could say, oh make this a little bit more spread out, but pull that one in a little tighter. It's kind of amazing how you can make your own custom blur. - [Rob] Right, and if something like this, like a traditional shape, almost like a circle or an ellipse like this doesn't work, the other one that sometimes is a go-to is the path blur, where I can actually just kind of draw that path that I want to have the blur around. So if I'm trying to have something, I don't know, a product or something completely in focus and everything else blown out, I can do it that way as well. - [Rich] Here's my favorite. Check the box called Save Mask to Channel, and when you click OK it's going to make a special alpha channel for you. And now cmd + click or ctrl + click to load it and simply toss on an exposure adjustment. - [Rob] Darken that out, do whatever you need to do. It's almost like a traditional vignette. - [Rich] There we go, and it's going to limit it just to that edge quite nicely, which is kind of cool. - [Rob] It's great. So, now, I've done this on a still, I've done it on a piece of video. Obviously I can save the still. Can I render out, like if I needed this as a video clip? Can I render out of Photoshop? - [Rich] Absolutely. File, Export, Render Video, and it will spit it out. Piece of cake, and once you just choose that, select something. There's some uncompressed codecs that are a pretty good idea. So just spit that out as a QuickTime Movie. - [Rob] But I could do DPXs, I could do-- - [Rich] Yes, sure. Uncompressed sequence or a DPX image sequence, and both of those will give you pro-quality results. - [Rob] Cool. So, when we come back in just a moment, we're going to talk about one more option for creating these blurred or diffused background plates, and that's with a piece of technology that seems to be from the future, a light field camera.

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