the best way to blur a background in a photo is by using a wide aperture when you take it but
what if you can't control your camera aperture or you don't achieve enough blur and you can't
repeat the shot in this video i'll share a quick and easy way to blur the background in a photo
using lightroom to do this there are two problems we need to overcome the first is how to make an
accurate selection of our subject so that we don't blur it now that adobe has released the
new selection and masking tools in lightroom there is an easy way when i first click the masking icon
i can choose one of the masking and selection tools the easiest option by far is the new select
subject tool this works great with most photos where there's an obvious subject in the frame
in this photo it makes a precise selection of the man which you can see highlighted with the
red overlay if we look at the mask panel you can see a thumbnail of the mask that's been created
then below this is the select subject tool which was used to select the man it's possible to apply
multiple selection tools to the same mask to refine it using the add and subtract buttons
we'll be looking at an example of doing this shortly it's also a good idea to rename the
selections to something more meaningful if you're going to use multiple tools on the same mask
for this example i'll double click the selection and then enter the new name in the dialog
the next step is to invert the selection because we want our adjustment to apply to the background
and not the man to reverse the selection move your mouse pointer over the selection item in
the mask panel three dots then appear to the right which you can click this displays a pop-up
menu where you can select the invert option you should then see the red overlay inverted
now any adjustments i apply will be applied to the background and not to the man
earlier i said that we faced two problems and we've already dealt with the first
which was making an accurate selection the second problem we have though is how to blur something
because lightroom doesn't have a blur adjustment or at least it didn't when i recorded this video
fortunately there are a few adjustments that can help us the first is a sharpness slider
when i move this to the left it sets a negative value removing any sharpening that i'd set in
lightroom's detail panel but when i move it beyond the setting of -50 it begins to blur detail in the
selection and not just remove the sharpening let's zoom in and i'll turn the adjustment off and on
using the switch at the bottom of the adjustment panel you can see the label on the parcel is being
blurred by the adjustments i've applied the next adjustment that we can try is the texture slider
when i move that to -100 you can see that it blurs out the detail in the background
this slider is quite effective and like the sharpness slider you can move it all
the way to the left with reasonable results the third slider we can use for blurring is clarity
when i move this to the left you can see that it creates a soft blurry effect
the only problem that i find though when using negative clarity is that it produces more of a
glow effect than a blur because of this you might want to limit its use to probably no more than -50
it's also possible to increase the strength of the blurring by duplicating the mask
just move your mouse pointer over the thumbnail in the masks panel and you'll see three dots appear
to the right click these and you can then select the duplicate option if i turn all the adjustments
off and on at the top of the panel you can see the effect they're having now let's look at another
example where the select subject option doesn't work quite so well as before i'll start by using
the select subject option under the masking icon this makes a good selection of the man but it's
spilling over into some surrounding areas we also have this odd looking selection of the laptop and
book what we need to do is clean up these areas of the mask using other selection tools but first
i'm going to invert the selection as before now i can choose to add to the selection by clicking the
add button when i click the add button you can see the option to use different tools displayed i'll
choose the brush tool because the areas i want to include have irregular shapes for the settings
i'll use a slight feather on the brush i'll also have the flow down at about 50 with a 100 opacity
and importantly i'm using the auto mask option to help refine the selection as i paint the 50 flow
setting means that i need to make a few passes with the brush to build up the selection if you
spot an area where the selection spills over into another area where you don't want it use the undo
command it's easier than trying to correct the selection with the erase brush after making the
selection i can apply the adjustments again the real secret to being able to blur a background
in lightroom is to produce the best possible selection which is the subject of my recent book
there's also an adobe camera roll version if you prefer that to lightroom now sometimes when you
duplicate a mask to make the effect stronger the edges of the selection can begin to look
a little false if you see this happening use the subtract option with the brush tool you can then
paint around the edge of the object to improve the edge whilst the new select subject option makes
complex selections easy there is an alternative in this video i demonstrate how to create a complex
selection using the lightroom brush tool in just a couple of clicks if you're using
an older version of lightroom you don't want to miss this but you can also use the same technique
in lightroom today now if you haven't already done so please do take a moment to subscribe and don't
forget to share this video with others thanks for watching and i'll see you soon in another video