Hello, I'm Helen Bradley.
Welcome to this video tutorial.
In this tutorial I'm going to show you how you can add movement to a simple image using
Blur.
Before we get started let's have a look at the effect that we're trying to achieve.
This here is the original image.
It's a fairground image and it's not actually in very good focus.
So we've going to give an effect to the image that's going to suggest movement and take
your attention a little bit away from the fact that the focus is not directly on these
girls.
We're going to do that by adding a Motion Blur to the image and then mask out the blur.
Then I'm going to boost the color in the image just a little bit and we'll finish off with
this sort of Glow effect which really centers your attention in on what's happening here
on the fairground ride.
So let's see how we're going to achieve this effect.
Here I have a duplicate of the original image.
I'm going to make a second background layer so I'm going to right click on this layer,
choose Duplicate Layer and click Ok.
That gives me two of these background layers.
This one I'm going to blur.
I'll do that by choosing Filter, Blur and I want to use a Radial Blur because that's
the kind of blur that is going to spin out from where they are.
I could use Spin which is around where they are or Zoom.
And I think Zoom is going to work best for this image.
Here I can position the center of the blur anywhere I want it and I'm thinking somewhere
around this girl or this girl's face would be best so I'm going to position it sort of
in the bottom corner of the image just sort of around about here.
And then I can choose the amount and pretty much an amount between 30 and 40 is probably
going to be sufficient for this image.
It doesn't need to be too scientific.
So I'll click Ok.
And there's our Blur effect.
You can see it's centered on this area here.
In fact I might just undo it and just place it a little bit better.
So now I can add a mask to this layer so that we can start painting back the detail over
the girls' faces.
To do that I'll click this icon at the foot of the Layers palette.
It's the Add Layer Mask icon.
It adds a white filled layer to the image.
I want black as my Foreground color so I'm going to press D to get back to the default
colors and then X to make black my Foreground color.
I could also just click on this icon here to set the default colors and click here to
invert the colors so that black is my Foreground color.
I need a brush so I'll click on the Brush tool and I'm just going to select a nice soft
brush with a fairly large size on it.
This is 300 pixels.
Now it's still a little bit small so I'll press the Square Bracket key to make it a
little bit bigger, make sure the mask is targeted.
It's got this little box around it so that I'm painting on the mask not on the image
and I'm just going to bring back in detail over these girls' faces.
Then shrink the brush down a little bit using the Square Bracket key and just bring in some
detail from the fairground ride and bring in their arms as well.
So I'm interested in these three girls but not a lot of what's happening in the background.
So I'm just going to bring them back in and leave everything else nicely out of focus.
Now you can be more careful with this and if you make a mistake just switch colors and
go back and paint the blur back onto the areas that you removed the blur from.
I think I'm going to add a bit more blur into the background here to try and get rid of
that fairground rider behind the girls because it's not relevant to our subjects here.
So once I've got that the way I want it to look I'm going to add a bit more Vibrance
but I'll only going to do it to the background layer so that the Vibrance is only going to
come through on the areas that are actually sharp.
To do that I'll choose Layer, New Adjustment Layer and I'll choose Vibrance.
Vibrance is a good adjustment for color because what it does is it saturates undersaturated
colors and it also has a protection for skin tones so skin tones won't blow out and go
all orange.
And so I've just brought in a little bit more Saturation into that image.
You can see that if I added Saturation instead of Vibrance kind of Saturation we're going
to blow out all their skin tones.
It's not going to look attractive at all.
But Vibrance is a really, really good adjustment to use here.
Now once we've done this we want to add our sort of White Glow effect and I'm going to
do that with a new layer so I'm just going to click the Add New Layer icon here.
And I need to fill it with something and it doesn't matter what I fill it with so I'm
just going to fill it with this aqua color that is my currently set Foreground color.
I'm going to click in that layer and press Alt Backspace, Option Delete to fill it with
the color.
Now you might be thinking that we've made a huge mistake here because we want a white
glow and right now we've got a blue fill but if we reduce the fill on this layer to zero
we'll get nothing.
But because we've actually got some content here we do have something that we can add
a glow to.
So I'm going to click here on this FX icon and choose to add an Inner Glow.
Now the Inner Glow I want needs to be white so for a start I'm going to set the color
here to white or nearest to it that I can be bothered setting right now.
I also want it to be nice and soft.
I want it to be on the edge and I want it to be quite a large size.
So you can see I'm dragging it in to a large size here.
We can make it more opaque and we could also change the contour on it if we wanted to.
But essentially what I'm looking for is a nice white edge to the image so I'll click
Ok.
So there's the effect that we just added to block out the edges of that image.
So here's the result that we've achieved.
We've taken this image.
We've added a bit of Vibrance to it.
We've added the Motion Blur and then brought back the details in just the girls themselves
and then we've added this Glow effect around the edge to really focus in on the girls as
being the detail point in the image.
I'm Helen Bradley.
Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial.
Look out for more video tutorials like this on my YouTube channel and consider subscribing
to the channel so you'll be alerted when new videos are released.
Also visit my website at Projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop,
Lightroom, Illustrator and a whole lot more.