In this article we'll explain how to create that professional portrait look where the subject in a photo is in focus, but the background is out of focus and blurred.
Give photos a narrow depth of field
How much of a scene is in focus is determined by the depth of field. If you want a large depth of field so that everything is in focus from the foreground to the far distance you need to either use your camera’s landscape mode setting or switch to aperture-priority more and select a small aperture (large f-number).
If you accidentally end up with too small a depth of field you can’t correct it later. However, sometimes you specifically want a small depth of field. A classic example is so you can photograph something or someone in the foreground while rendering the background blurred so that it won’t be distracting. You can achieve this by zooming in on your subject as much as possible, or by selecting a large aperture (small f-number). Compact digital cameras don't offer as wide a range of apertures as a digital SLR, but those with a big zoom can achieve the same effect.
Bear in mind that when shooting with very large apertures, such as f/1.8, you need to be careful to ensure your subject's eyes are in focus. When apertures are very large, only a tiny portion of the image could be in focus, so avoid using f/2 or below if there's more than one subject in the frame as if one is slightly closer to the camera one or the other will be blurry.
Of course, you can create the effect of a narrow depth of field by blurring the background of your photo in Photoscape.
Click on ‘Effects Brush’ in the Tools tab and select Blur from the options offered. Now paint over the parts of the photo you want to blur (probably the background) while holding down the left mouse button. Note that there are three different brush sizes to choose from. In reality, the effect is very subtle in PhotoScape (but not necessarily with other software) so you may have to repeatedly use the effects brush to achieve a really blurred background.
Here are the before and after images:
Before
After
This article is part of our Fix your photos feature, and uses the free Photoscape image editor from www.photoscape.org. The principles apply to other image editing software, but the steps above explain how to achieve the fix in Photoscape.
Comments
Leon Cooper said: I do it on a regular basis and it takes 15 minutes if Im having a hard time Yes I use much more expensive software that my company has paid for hey you do get what you pay for and when youre running a business throughput pays for itself but its totally doable with Photoshop Elements which is pretty affordable Ive done this with Elements 20 Im sure the current version is worlds better
Leon Cooper said: That looks terrible why did you blur the road the car was actually sitting on Do you know how depth of field works You want to narrow the depth of field - that is to say you need to decrease the range in which things are in focus The area on the Z axis Y Being UpDown X being Left Right Z being CloseFar directly surrounding the car would still be in focus Photoshop Elements would be a better program for this because its cheap and capable Alternatively if you could afford Photoshop CS6 what youd do is create a mask around your subject select the inverse and create a new channel Then youd keep the selection apply a gradient to it updown so that on the channels palette the subject is black and the gradient fades from white to black Then apply lens blur to the original layer using the new alpha channel as a depth map for a much more realistic blur Even if you painted by hand you wouldnt want to paint over the areas that obviously should be in focus as you did here
Mike said: If I didnt know better than to suggest it I would say that the example fixed photo was actually a duplicate taken with a wide aperture It is very difficult to achieve blurring tightly around and in-between multiple objects as shown takes a long time to achieve and it is difficult to achieve uniformity of blur using such a tool Our eyes are very good at picking up anything unnatural in a photo so a realistic result can be hard to achieve Best used when you just have a simple subject eg a flower a head amp shoulders and you just want to blur everything around it