in that tutorial, I showed you how to use the Blur Lens filter to create the blurry
The first step is to duplicate the original image. You can duplicate a layer by simply
pressing Control J on Windows, Command J on the Mac, and I will do that two times.
The first copy I will rename to Background. And the second copy I will call Foreground.
And I'm going to just work on the Foreground layer. And what I'm going to do is select
a Quick Selection Tool from the toolbar.
Then I can click-and-drag to make a selection around my Foreground element, in this case
my friend Cheryl.
but if you're in the latest version of Photoshop, then with the Quick Selection Tool you'll
have access to the Select Subject button which allows you to automatically make a selection
out of the main subject of the image.
This uses Adobe Sensei, which is Adobe's artificial intelligence, to make the selection.
So click on Select Subject, press OK to discard the current selection, and Photoshop's machine
learning technology will make a good guess of what the main subject of the image is.
It does a really good job, but it's not perfect. We will have to fine-tune the selection. So
you can hold the Alt key on Windows or click on this icon here to subtract from the selection.
I think it's easier just holding the key for shortcut.
Alt, click-and-drag to deselect from areas that you don't intend to select, like these
areas in between her face and her arm, in between her fingers.
If you deselect her finger like I did here, you can just click-and-drag to add the selection.
If you clicked on this minus button, you will have to click on the plus button to add, which
is why I prefer the keyboard shortcuts.
You just hold Alt, click-and-drag to subtract, and if you want to add you just release the
Alt key, which is Option on the Mac, and you continue clicking and dragging to add to the
selection.
One thing I want to mention is that you don't have to be very precise when making the selection,
at least not now, and this is one of the advantages of this method over the method that I showed
you five years ago.
So just make sure that you have a good enough selection that the main areas are selected.
I'll just keep fine-tuning the selection just a bit. Got a little more work to do on the
hat and in other areas of her body.
What I'm going to do now is click on the layer mask icon so that I can create a layer mask
on the Foreground element. And that means that the selection would become a layer mask
that hides everything that was not selected. So we just keep the foreground element.
So we took the selection and we made a layer mask out of it.
A layer mask hides pixels based on the luminosity that you paint with. If you hold Alt on Windows,
Option on the Mac and click on the layer mask thumbnail, you will see the actual layer mask.
Black hides and white reveals, so everything in black will be hidden, everything in white
will show. And the different levels of gray will give you different levels of opacity.
So we have a silhouette of my friend Cheryl, so that's what we're going to keep.
I'm going to hold Alt on Windows, Option on the Mac and click on the layer mask thumbnail
to bring her back. And, as you saw, the mask wasn't perfect and that's OK. We'll worry
about that later.
What I'm going to do now is do the opposite of what we did. We created a layer mask based
on a selection. Now we're going to create a selection based on a layer mask.
So I'm going to use this layer mask to create a selection. And to do so, all I need to do
is hold the Control key on Windows, Command key on the Mac and click.
That will load a selection around the layer mask, the active pixels, and then I can disable
it and I can enable the background element.
And what I'm going to do now is expand the selection to make it larger so that the selection
edge is past the edges of the main subject's body.
And the way that we're going to do that is by going into Select, Modify, Expand.
This window comes up and all you need to do is select a number of pixels to expand by,
and an image about this size which is 786 by 1080, three pixels should be OK.
In a larger image you might want to add a few more pixels.
So add three pixels and press OK. And what you really want to do, what you really want
to make sure is that you have a space between her and the background.
I'll press the Z key on the keyboard to enable the Zoom tool and then I'll click to zoom in.
And you can see now that we have space between the edge of the selection and her body, and
that's what you want.
What I'm going to do now is simply double-click on the Hand tool to fit the image to screen.
Then I'm going to bring up the Fill dialog box.
You can do that one of two ways. You can go into Edit and Fill, but I prefer using the
keyboard shortcut Shift and Backspace.
Shift, Delete on the Mac.
And that brings up the Fill dialog box. With the Fill dialog box, you can fill with the
foreground color, background color, any color that you want, or Content-Aware, which is
content that Photoshop will fill based on the content of surrounding areas.
So you can simply press OK and Photoshop fills in the selection with content, making our
friend Cheryl disappear, which is exactly what we want.
And the fill does not need to be perfect.
All we're really worried about is the edges wherever the selection is, and maybe five
pixels in, because that will give us the flexibility to fix halos and other problems with the mask
when we apply the blur.
And that's why this method is more flexible than the method I showed you five years ago.
We don't need this selection anymore.
All we need to do now is press Control D on Windows, Command D on the Mac to deselect,
and we can enable the Foreground layer. So now we have our original image back.
What I'm going to do now is with the Background layer selected I'm going to right-click and
convert it into a Smart Object.
You can think about a Smart Object as a container that holds one or multiple layers, and you
can apply non-destructive adjustments, filters, and transformations.
And we're going to apply a filter to blur the background. And there's actually two ways
of doing it. I'll show you both.
What you need to do is, with this background layer selected, I'll call it Background again
just because we lost the layer name.
So the background there is selected and I can go into Filter, Blur Gallery and we'll
start with Field Blur.
And that gives us this point that we can click-and-drag and place anywhere that we want, so I'll just
place it here, and I can reduce the blur or increase the blur.
See that?
But obviously, this effect is not very realistic because she would need to be in focus in the
area where she's standing on.
So to make this more realistic I can click on the area that she's standing on and reduce
the blur. So now there's a smooth transition between the focus area and the out-of-focus area.
All I need to do now is just select this point and just place it directly above this point,
like right about here, and adjust the blur accordingly.
See that?
See how we're getting a nice, blurry background? So this is one method of doing it. I'm going
to click on this checkbox and show you the second method.
The second method uses the Tilt-Shift filter. You can select it from within the Blur Gallery
or you can press on Cancel and select the Background layer and go into Filter, Blur
Gallery, Tilt-Shift.
Either or will get you here. And this is the point where the image is in focus.
These two solid lines indicate the areas that are in focus, and from the solid line to the
dashed line on top, or the dashed line at the bottom, there's a gradual transition between
in-focus pixels and blurry pixels.
So you can just click-and-drag this down to the area of the image that should be in focus.
which is where she's standing on.
And you can click-and-drag on the dashed line to control the gradual transition of the blur
to create the shallow depth-of-field effect, and then you can adjust the blur accordingly.
When you're done, you can simply press OK and, since we applied this filter to a Smart
Object, we can come back and make adjustments to it.
For example, I can double-click on Blur Gallery on the filter label. It brings it back up
and I can make adjustments. For now, I'm just going to keep that layer there.
I'll click on this arrow to collapse the Smart Filter to give us a little more room to work
with, and I'll enable the original layer. And you can see the before and the after.
And this is the power of this technique. Notice that the selection was not perfect, obviously.
So now I can come back and fine-tune it.
I can click on the layer mask thumbnail, then from the Properties panel click on Select
and Mask, which will bring up the Select and Mask workspace, and I can use the sliders
on the right to fine-tune the layer mask.
For example, I can smooth it, create contrast and maybe shift the edge inward a little bit.
And that helps, of course. You can use these settings to get started. Obviously, your image
may require more fine-tuning.
And, by the way, if you want to learn more about the Select and Mask workspace, then
check out my tutorial on masking. I'm going to place a link down below in the description,
and in that video, I cover all these different sliders and how you can use them to extract
a foreground from a background. I highly recommend you watching this video.
But anyway, I'm just going to press OK to commit the changes to the mask. I could also
zoom in into the details and I can select the Brush tool and paint with black to hide
pixels.
If your brush tip is a little too big, you can click on this down-pointing arrow and
from this panel slide the side slider to the left.
Or, you can use the keyboard shortcuts, Left Bracket, to make the brush tip smaller or
the Right Bracket key to make the brush tip larger.
So I'll make it smaller and I'll just come in here and paint.
So even if you go pretty deep in, we can still see the blurry background because on the layer
below we removed Cheryl from the background.
We then blur the layer so the blurry background does not contain Cheryl at all and we can
paint in the mask to reveal that background giving us a whole lot of flexibility.
I'm going to undo that last brushstroke by pressing Control Z, Command Z on the Mac,
and I'm going to continue fine-tuning the image.
In your image, spend a lot of time fine-tuning it, but in the tutorial, I'm not going to
spend too much time on that.
Because I want to spend the time that we have together showing you more powerful techniques
that you could use with this method.
I'm going to double-click on the Hand tool to fit the image to screen. Next, I'm going
to show you how to add the bokeh effect to this image.
Bokeh are those circular, round, blurry highlights that you see on images. In a real photo that
is just simply how the lens renders out-of-focus points of light, but obviously we're going
to use Photoshop to create the bokeh effect.
So let me show you how to do that. First I'm going to expand the Smart Filter and I'm going
to click on the Blur Gallery label to open up the Tilt-Shift Blur filter again.
Under the Effects panel, drag the Light Bokeh slider to the right and Photoshop will start
creating that effect of out-of-focus points of light.
And I'm just going to adjust the blur accordingly until I get the effect that I want. It looks
great on the cars, but I don't like it how it looks up here on the top left on this bright
sunlight, so I'm not going to worry about it for now. We'll deal with it in a moment.
And I'll press OK.
What I'll do now is get rid of this big, bright highlight, and to do so I'm going to select
the Background layer and duplicate it. Press Control J on Windows, Command J on the Mac,
and I'll call this layer Bokeh.
And this is the layer that's going to contain the Bokeh effect, but I'm going to hide the
layer. So I'm going to hold Alt on Windows, Option on the Mac, and click on the layer
mask icon to create a black layer mask which hides everything in that layer mask.
Then I'm going to go back into the Background layer, expand it, double-click on the Blur
Gallery, and I'm just going to disable the bokeh effect. So we have the same blur without bokeh.
Then I'll press OK and with white, on this bokeh effect layer, I'm going to selectively
bring that bokeh effect back.
So I'll select the Brush tool, make sure that white is my foreground color.
So I'll click on the default foreground and background color icon to make white my foreground color.
I'll increase the size of my brush. And with the Bokeh layer mask active, the little white
box, the outline is on that layer mask, I'll paint on these areas to bring the bokeh effect back.
And I can reduce the opacity or increase it to adjust the effect, but I think this works
good enough. And what I'll do now is finalize the image by treating this as a single layer.
So I'm going to collapse all of these layers so that you can see what I'm going to do.
I'm going to select the Foreground layer. Then I'm going to hold Shift and click on
the Background layer.
With all the layers selected, I'm going to right-click and select Convert to Smart Object.
Now I can treat this as a single layer and apply really cool effects using the Camera Raw Filter.
If I go into Filter, Camera Raw, you can use these sliders to control the luminosity and
color of the image.
So I can start with the temperature. I can click-and-drag to the right to warm up the image.
I can scroll down and adjust the highlights, maybe I'll make the highlights a little bit
brighter. Brighten up the shadows as well. Increase the texture. This is the newest slider
in Camera Raw.
It allows you to enhance the texture found in your photo. I could also increase the clarity,
which is contrast in the midtones.
And I can keep scrolling down to adjust the Vibrance and saturation. These sliders add
saturation to the image.
I usually prefer using Vibrance since Vibrance is the controlled way of adding saturation.
It protects already saturated pixels and skin tones. So I can click-and-drag this to the
right.
And you can click on this icon to see the before and the after.
To enhance the effect even further, I'm going to click on the Radio Filter, which allows
me to make a circle and apply all these different adjustments within it.
And I'm going to reset the settings just to start from scratch. So I'm going to click
on this menu, on these four lines, and then select Reset
Local Correction Settings. And all I'm going to do is, I'm going to click-and-drag a circle,
like so, from that area. And make sure that Inside is selected.
That way all the adjustments appear inside of the circle. Then make sure that you have
a high Feather.
The Feather controls how sharp or blurry the edges of the circle are. So you want blurry
edges for this circle.
I'll set my Feather to 80. If that doesn't work, I can increase it later, but make sure
that it's high. And then you can increase the
Exposure and make it yellow. So that's like a bright sunlight coming in. And I can also
increase the highlights in that area and the whites. We're just trying to create the effect
that the sun is peeking through the trees.
You can obviously spend a whole lot of time fine-tuning the image. I'm just going to press
OK and show you one last thing.
This method of working non-destructively and applying all these filters to get this effect
is really powerful, because if I decide to go back and edit my original image, I still
can.
Let me show you one last thing that you can do now that you have everything set up.
You can double-click on this layer, on the layer thumbnail, that's a Smart Object.
When you do, it'll open up this new tab that contains the three layers that we used to
create this composite.
I'm going to double-click on the Hand tool to fit it to screen, and you can see them.
The Foreground element, the Bokeh and the Background. And if your client, your boss
or you decide that you want to make a change, you can still make that change and still keep
every other filter that we applied.
For example, one of the things that you may want to do is remove this patch of dirt and
fill it with grass. And one of the ways that you would do that is by double-clicking on
this layer thumbnail which is also a Smart Object.
So we have a Smart Object nested in a Smart Object.
And that will open up yet another tab that has this Background element. So I'm going
to duplicate the Background element to work non-destructively, and I'm just going to use
a tool to fill this in.
Initially, you might think that you could use the same technique we used earlier to
remove Cheryl.
Selecting the Lasso Tool, making a selection around that patch of dirt.
Then going into Edit, Fill and then selecting Content-Aware. And that would kind of work,
but it doesn't look very good.
Notice how blurry the result is. There's not a lot of detail. There's actually a tool that
you can use that'll give you much better results.
So let me undo that by pressing Control Z on Windows, Command Z on the Mac.
I'll double-click on the Hand tool to fit the image to screen, and with the selection
still active, what you want to do is, under the Spot Healing Brush Tool you'll see the
Patch Tool nested. Make sure that Source is selected.
Then you can click-and-drag this area into a patch of grass like this area here and release.
When you do that, Photoshop will match the color and texture, and it'll completely fill
that dirt in with grass and it looks much, much better.
I'll press Control D, Command D in the Mac, and I'll close this tab, save it and that
effect gets applied onto this Background layer like you see here.
I can close this tab, save this Smart Object and that, obviously, is also updated on this Smart Object.
So it's an incredibly powerful way to work. Everything is editable. You can always come
back and fine-tune everything later.
At this point, what I recommend that you do is zoom in really, really close to all the
edges of the image and just go and mask out all these little imperfections, like in this
area here. When you're done, you can save your image and they'll be updated on the final