Guess who's back, back again!
Sorry things have been crazy,
I've been busy,
and there's been the virus.
Meh, you know.
In today's video,
I'm going to show you a magic trick for 360 photography.
It doesn't matter which 360 camera you own
today you'll learn
how to create a blurry background 360 photo.
Almost like it was taken with a DSLR
with a shallow depth of field.
And it's gonna be simulated,
which means you can go back
to previous photos you've taken,
you don't have to go outside right now.
But you can go back into your archive
and turn some of your old photos
into a shallow depth of field 360 photo.
This is a really cool effect,
I used to love getting
that depth of field as shallow as
I possibly could
when I was into DSLR photography
a few years ago.
And since 360 cameras have a fixed aperture,
it's really hard to do it
unless you use this trick.
Now you are going to need
a 360 photo editing program.
Here, I'll be using Photoshop,
you can also use Affinity Photo
and I think, that might be it.
There could be others, I don't know.
You'll have to look into it.
But in this example,
it's Photoshop and Photoshop
is my go-to 360 photo editing program.
So the first thing I always do in Photoshop
when editing 360 photos is right click
the background layer
and going duplicate layer.
And this is essentially having a backup,
so if we don't like what we've done,
we can always undo it and start from scratch.
Next, we'll go up to 3D > spherical panorama
and new Panorama from selected layer.
This is essentially the 360 mode of Photoshop
and yeah mine's a bit laggy as you can see,
but it's still working fine.
Now I'm going to change my field of view
to one so we can get as far back as possible.
And essentially what we're doing here
is creating a layering effect
where we want to isolate the car
and make sure that's not touched.
We want that to be as sharp as possible.
So we'll only exclusively be working
on the background outside of the car.
But the thing is, right now,
we only have a small window into this 360 photo.
There's so much more up and down
and all around.
So how do we edit the whole photo at once?
What we're going to do
is double click spherical map,
and now we can see the equirectangular 360 photo,
and it's created a new file here called
background copy.psb.
So now what we need to do is isolate the car
and there are countless ways of doing this,
and I'm sure you've got a personal favorite way
of isolating things in Photoshop,
but here I'll show you how I do it.
Now, a cool feature they've added recently
is the object selection tool,
where you can essentially create a window,
over the object you want to select,
and it tries its best to figure out
what you've selected.
And right there already,
it's done a pretty good job.
It's not perfect,
you can see it's missed a few areas.
So another new tool
that will help us select what's been missed,
is the quick selection tool.
And what it does it essentially
adds things to the selection.
So as you can see,
it's missed a few bits of the car
and I wanna add them.
So firstly, I'm going to click on the snow on the roof
and we can see it's added that to the selection.
Now I'm going to go over here,
to another spot it missed,
gonna keep clicking on the areas
it missed in this selection.
When you're using this tool,
do your best to stay within the boundary
of the item you're trying to select.
So if I do this,
you can see the circle goes outside of the car.
So if I click that,
it's selecting some of the snow,
whereas if I move my selection down
to not have any snow within the circle,
there you go.
It's selected the car just as I wanted it.
Now this selection is almost perfect,
the only small bit I can see
that it selected that I don't want selected
is this bit of snow here.
So now we want to get rid of just that.
And to do that,
you can see at the top
there's a plus and minus selection.
So I want to minus this
and just like I plussed everything else,
and I added all those small areas this lacking,
I'm gonna do the same with the snow.
So I simply click the mouse
and there we go.
Now, when I zoom out,
you can see the car is perfectly selected.
Now what I'm going to do
is go up to the select menu
and choose inverse.
And what this does
is it's now selecting everything
that wasn't what I just selected,
which is the background.
Now it's the exciting thing.
We're going to apply the effect, he hee.
So I'm going to go to filter blur
and I'm going to choose motion blur.
Now I'll have a play with
and see what looks good.
That's looking great already,
look at that.
Now you don't wanna overdo it,
you don't wanna make it like that,
that's just too much
and it doesn't look good,
it's not going to look good in your end photo.
It needs to be a realistic blur.
So I'll bring it back to this.
This is probably the most I would blur it
because this is accurate
to the kind of motion blur you could get
if you were shooting this kind of shot with the DSLR.
Now we'll hit okay.
Now that that's done,
I'm going to hit the X button on this PSB file
and it's gonna ask if I wanna save,
yes, I do.
Now when we go back to our original shot
and look around,
you can see we've got our motion blur
on the horizon
yet our car is pinning sharp.
Now there may sometimes be a bit of a seam line,
but that's pretty easy to edit out.
What I'm going to use is the spot healing brush
and just draw over it bit by bit.
Now check the rest of the shot
for any other kind of seam line
or imperfection and do the same thing.
All right, now to export this,
you're not going to go file save as
because what that would do
is export this window as we have it here,
not the 360 photo.
So to export 360 photos properly from Photoshop,
you're going to go up to the 3D menu again,
spherical panorama now to export panorama.
Now how cool does that look?
Oh my God,
that is actually really cool.
It looks kind of high production value,
even though I only took this on my $400, 360 camera,
just as a happy snap as I was driving through a forest,
but this now has the feel
of a DSLR photo with the blurry background
and the focus really being on that car
right there in the middle.
You know, I've actually seen this countless times
with DSLR photography.
If they're trying to promote a car,
they'll use a slow shutter speed
to blur the background
and keep the car in crystal clear focus.
This is essentially the 360 photo version of that.
He, he. That was kind of fun.
And you can use this effect
for any kind of 360 photo really,
especially with people.
You know what?
In fact I'm gonna do that right now.
Mr. Ben never says no to a challenge,
so now I'll follow the exact same workflow
I just showed you.
Except this time it's going to require
a bit more cutting around the edges
of me and my girlfriend there,
and then I'm going to blur
the background of the golden gate bridge,
drawing more attention to us
and those nose hairs!
All right, now this time with the blur,
I'm not going to use a motion blur
cause we're not moving
instead of I'll go for a gaussian blur.
And yeah, that seems to suit quite well.
It's already looking like a DSLR photo
with that shallow depth of field.
Gonna take it to the extreme side
and that's way too much,
gonna bring it back,
and I'm happy with about that.
But just to be sure,
I'm gonna to go back to my
360 photo and see what it looks like
in 360 mode.
All right, let's take a look around nice,
or could use a bit of fixing at the bottom there,
but yeah, that's actually really effective.
Like that legit looks like
it was shot with the DSLR
and yes, look,
I could definitely get my selections better
in her hair and along her cheekbone there.
But to be honest,
I'm not really that obsessive of an editor.
What I will do though in those areas
is use the blur tool.
I'm gonna zoom in really close
and just blur them a tiny bit,
just so that they don't stand out as much.
And at the bottom,
we've got a bit of cat but nadar,
and I'm gonna do my best to get rid of that somehow.
And how good did that turn out?
This 360 photo looks awesome.
It's funny how much we're used to seeing
360 photos with an infinite depth of field,
but trying to effect like this
can take your 360 photos to the next level
because it's something different
and it's a new creative thing that
you can try, that.
Look, it's not going to suit every single situation,
but it might be cool to try.
If you got one or two people close to the camera,
if you got a car,
an object or certain things,
you want to draw attention to,
this is definitely gonna be a cool effect
that you can add to your bag of tricks.
And now I've got some exciting news to share.
If you're into creating
cool 360 photo effects like these,
you probably know by now
I've written an Ebook called
"A Beginner's Guide to Tiny Planet Photography",
which has been for sale for the past few years now.
Well, as of right now,
I've decided to offer my book completely free.
Yes, you don't have to pay anything for it
and it will be free for the foreseeable future.
I don't know,
it may change in the future, who knows?
But for now it's free
and you can download it
in the link in the description.
I'm feeling generous.
I guess I also feel guilty
for not posting videos in a while.
So maybe I can do that to make up for it.
Anyway, that's it for this video,
hit the like button if you liked this video,
hit the dislike if you hated it,
if it's like the worst video you've ever seen,
it all helps for my YouTube SEO anyway.
And that's it,
I'll see you next time.