Blur backgrounds in Lightroom
Make your subject stand out with this simple painting technique.
One of the simplest pleasures in photography is when you set a shallow depth of field, focus carefully on your subject and take your shot. The look and feel of the resulting sharp subject and blurred background is deeply satisfying.
Conversely, there are few photographic mishaps to rival the disappointment when you review a shot and realise you hadn’t adjusted the depth of field – or maybe you were using Shutter Priority and the camera stopped down the aperture more than you would have liked.
So it’s a good job that Lightroom offers a simple way to fix the issue, and give you the blurred background you’d intended to capture. Although it’s not quite as good as the real thing you’d get in-camera, it will help give your image a nice aesthetic and help to draw the viewer’s attention to your subject.
This simple technique takes advantage of Lightroom’s Local Adjustments toolset, which enables you to make edits to a chosen area within your shot.