In this tutorial, I'm showing how to add or enhance a shallow Depth of field in Photoshop.
What's going on guys?
Ehsan is here with another quick Photoshop tutorial.
Shallow depth of Field can makes your image more like a high-end DSLR camera image with a fast
lens and in this video, I'm showing how to add some shallow depth of field to your image in postprocessing,
something like the portrait mode in your smartphone but more accurate and customizable.
There are some differences between this effect and an in-camera shallow depth of field but
using this technique can add some value to your images and could be useful for some
situations and also it is fun to know and have this effect in your pocket.
But before jumping to the tutorial for those who are new here, I'm doing photography and
filmmaking tutorials, editing tips, and tech reviews so if you haven't subscribed yet consider it
and also turn the notification on for future videos to not miss anything and without
further ado let's jump into it.
To start, we need to cut the subject out from the background, so make a copy of the background
layer by hitting Command or CTRl + J, select the Quick Selection Tool and draw on the subject
to make a selection out of it.
Try to make it accurate as much as possible and make sure to exclude all the little areas
between fingers, hand, and body.
Now hit the Select and Mask button.
First, change your View Mode to Black and White and start to refine your selection with
the help of the Refine Edge Brush Tool.
I have a complete tutorial on how to remove background in photoshop so if you want to
learn how to select your subject in detail, you can simply watch that video.
I put its link on the screen now so I'm just fast-forwarding the refining process now.
After you are done with the selection add a bit Feather to it
and select New Layer with Layer Mask for Output then hit OK.
As you can see a new layer was created and the subject is selected with a mask,
so we can adjust the selection in the future if it's needed.
Let's rename the new layer to Subject and the below layer to something like Blur.
Let's enable all of the layers and see what is happening if we add blur to the image without
cutting the subject.
You can see this color fades around the subject that makes the effect completely unusable
and for avoiding that we need to do one more thing.
First, let's remove the blur, we have to remove the subject from the blur layer.
To do that, disable the Subject Layer, Hold Command or CTRL and hit on the Subject layers mask. It’ll load the subject selection.
With the Blur layer selected go to the Edit menu and select Content Aware-Fill.
Expand the selection a bit and play with the settings to get an almost a good Fill.
I also have a tutorial about Content Aware-Fill, the link is on the screen now.
It's enough so let’s hit Ok to create the Fill layer.
Select the fill layer and hit the Command or CTRL + E to merge it with the Blur layer.
to remove these dark lines select the Spot Healing Brush tool and clean those areas.
Enable the Subject layer again, as you can see we have removed some of the small details
on hairs but don't worry we will fix it later.
To add the blur effect first, you need to make your Blur layer a Smart Object.
Make a right-click on the Blur layer and select Convert to Smart Object.
In this case, we can go back and adjust the amount of the blur we are adding to the layer
if it's needed.
To add the blur go to the Filter menu, Blur Gallery and select Tilt-Shift.
All the areas above this little dot will have some gradual blur and you can change the area
that will affect by filter simply by moving the dot.
Move it all the way down cause we don't have any gradual line between subject and the background
and increase the amount of blur.
About 20 is good enough, to make the blurriness more realistic and not fake or photoshopy,
you have to add some grain to it.
Select the Noise tab and add a bit of noise to the blurred areas.
Don't go too far, around 10 percent is a safe spot most of the times.
Now hit OK.
It already adds some character to the image but we need some small tweaks to make it even better.
If you feel that the blur amount is too much or not enough just make a double click on
the Blur Gallery and you can simply change the settings again.
Some of the cuts of the subject seem too harsh so we can add a bit blur to make them soft,
Select the mask, not the layer itself, choose Blur Tool and draw on the cuts.
Hold the Option or Alt key and click on the subject mask.
As you can see I'm just blurring the mask not the subject.
Blur all the areas you think they are too harsh to create a soft cut between the subject
and the background to replicate a wider aperture look.
If you see some miss selected areas use the Brush tool and clean those areas.
Paint with Black to remove from the selection and to add to selection paint with White.
Click on this little eye icon to go back to the image itself.
To recover some of the small details like hairs, make a copy of the background layer
by hitting Command or CTRL + J,
put it on top of all the layers, let's rename it to
details and change its blending mode to Darken.
In this way, it will only affect the lighter pixels so we can have our small details back.
Hold Option or Alt key and hit on this Add Layer Mask icon to create a black mask,
then with a white brush draw on the areas you want to add some details.
That's it.
Let's see the before and after.
Thanks for watching.
Use this technique and share your result with us, give this video a thumbs up and leave
a comment if you have another way to add some shallow depth of field in photoshop.
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