Photoshop CS Timesaving Techniques For Dummies [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Blurring for Emphasis

Blurring portions of a photograph makes the viewer’s eye immediately travel to the sharp areas of the picture. This technique has been used for years in photography and motion pictures.

Photoshop has eight different blur filters (count ’em!). The first three blur commands on the menu — Average, Blur, and Blur More — give you no control. They are one-shot filters that let you only click and blur. I don’t use them very often. Instead, I usually head for the Gaussian Blur command, which gives control over the amount and quality of a blur.

Here’s how to create a slight blur around a face to emphasize it:

Open the image to which you want to add a blur.

For this example, I’m using the photo of the girl shown in Figure 37-5.




Figure 37-5: I’m blurring the bicycle area to make the viewer immediately look at the girls face.






Use any of the selection tools to select the face or faces in the photograph whose details you want to preserve.

For this example, I’m using the Lasso tool to select the girl’s face.





Choose Select>Inverse or press Ctrl+Shift+I/z+Shift+I.

This inverts the selection to select the area of the photograph that you want to blur. For my example, this selects the bicycles shown behind the girl.





Choose Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur.





Use the Radius slider to set the amount of blur, as shown in Figure 37-6.




Figure 37-6: Move the Radius slider to adjust the blur.


Radius can be set from 0.1 to 250. A Radius setting below 1 creates a very slight softening blur. Radius values between 1 and 5 create moderate blurs. Values above 5 blur the areas so much that they become unrecognizable. Experiment with the slider and see which results you like best.

For my example, I chose a Radius setting of 3.





Click OK to close the Gaussian Blur dialog box and apply the blur.

Take a look at Figure 37-7. Notice how the girl’s face is really the focus of attention.





Figure 37-7: Instead of just being another part of the photograph, the girl’s face is really the focal point now.








Tip

Instead of blurring the entire background of an image as I did with the preceding example, you could select a channel and blur only that channel. This method can create a blurring effect that creates a slight glow around objects, almost like a very subdued star filter. Figure 37-8 shows the photograph of the girl with only the Red channel sharpened using a Radius setting of 10. Compare it to the blurring in Figure 37-7. The effect is rather subtle, but can be quite nice. Figure 37-8: Blurring only one channel creates the effect of a slight glow.