Fake the fall-off and discover the Lens Blur filter in Photoshop Elements
Use the Lens Blur filter to soften cluttered backgrounds to create a realistic depth-of-field effect, with shallow James Paterson
Ablurred background can be a beautiful thing; it helps to focus attention on your subject and gives images a polished, photographic look that sets them apart from snaps and smartphone pics. However, it’s not always easy to achieve the effect in-camera. Luckily, when the background is too sharp and cluttered for your liking, you can mimic the blur.
But first it’s worth spending a moment to consider how sharpness and softness works in an optical sense, as this makes it easier to fake the fall-off in Photoshop. When we focus on a point in a scene, there’s an area of sharpness that stretches out in front of and behind that point – about one-third in front, two-thirds behind – with a gradual fall-off to softness either side of our sharp plane of focus.
The best way to emphasize this shallow focus is, of course, to get it right in-camera, either by using a combination of a wide aperture and long focal length, or by moving your subject further away from the backdrop. But this isn’t always possible – perhaps your lens’s max aperture isn’t wide enough, or its focal length too wide. Or perhaps the subject is too close to the background for decent separation between the two.
In these cases, we can turn to Photoshop Elements for a little help. Key to this technique is the Lens Blur filter, but before we use it we must first determine where the fall-off should occur. So we have to isolate the subject with a selection, then use a layer mask to control what’s blurry or sharp. It takes a little trial and error to get your ‘depth mask’ perfect, so we’ll run the filter twice…