Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you
four different ways that you could blur the background of a photo on your Mac.
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So a common request online no matter what type of computer or device you're using
is how do you take a photo and blur the background keeping the subject in
focus and the background scene blurred. Well, you can do this, of course, using
many different third party apps. So I'm going to show you how to do it with two
popular ones on the Mac and then two ways to do it without any extra apps at all.
So here's the photo I'm going to use as an example. First let's try to do this using
the popular Pixelmator Pro app. Now the way to do this in most third party apps is to first select
either a subject or the background so you could blur one and not the other. Now there are many
selection tools in Pixelmator Pro. I'm going to use the Quick Selection tool right here but you
can just as easily use a Free Selection, Magnetic Selection or any way that you can best select the
foreground or background. So I'm going to select the foreground here. You could see as I move over
the subject I could easily select it. Now I want to refine the selection so I'm going to zoom in
and look for places where I can do a little bit better. So for instance
here maybe I want to take something away I can hold the Option key down and remove
some from there. So in this case the Shift key will Add to the selection
and the Option key will Remove. It's a little hard to get it just perfect.
It helps if you zoom in a lot more so you could more easily see what's there and select in finer
detail. Then you've got to go through the entire border here and find areas to add or remove.
Once you've got it good enough you can refine the selection even more.
So if I go to Edit, Refine Selection I can see the Refine tools here. So I can expand or
shrink maybe just a little bit in, maybe 3% in, add a little softness to the selection.
Now I've got the subject selected but it's actually the background
I want to blur. I'm actually going to go to Edit, and then Invert Selection.
So now I've selected everything but the subject. Now I can go to Effects here,
Add An Effect, I'm going to do a Gaussian blur and I can blur the background. Change the blur
amounts to whatever it is I want. Then I'll Deselect here so I can see the finished version.
Now let's try the same thing, but I'm going to do it using Affinity Photo another popular app
for editing photos. So here there are selection tools as well. I could do the Flood Select tool
and try to select that way. I could do the Selection Brush and try to select
that way and it seems to work a little bit better in this case.
Just like in Pixelmator I'm going to zoom in on areas. It doesn't show you a plus or minus in
there but you can click to add more and then hold the Option key and then click to remove
sections. You can keep doing that also changing the width of the selection tool
and try to get it just right. Then here you could also Refine and then maybe do a little bit of
feathering there to create more of a fuzzier edge. Now I'm going to do something a little different
here. Another technique that would work in Pixelmator as well. I'm going to actually Copy
this selection here and then Paste it over. So when I look at layers here you could see I've got
this new one here that's just the subject and then there's the background. Let's get rid of
the selection there and I'm going to choose the background here. To this I'm going to apply the
effect of Gaussian Blur too and blur just the background. Actually if I go to layers here you
could see if I hide that first layer everything is blurred including the subject. But now I've
got the subject layered on top of itself right here so I've blurred everything and then put
the subject back. You could do this in Pixelmator Pro and in most other apps like PhotoShop as well.
So that's a second way to do it using an app that you can get in The Mac App Store.
But what if you just wanted to do this with the tools that come with your Mac.
There's no great way to do it unfortunately. But, you could try. So let's open this up in
Preview. Right. You'd think there would be a way to do this in Preview. But in fact not really.
Let's go to the Markup Tools. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to go to the selection
tools and I could use the Smart Lasso to try to select the subject. This will create this
red dot around here and try to cutout the subject based on your outline. It actually
sometimes works a little bit better with the regular tools like the Lasso tool but in this case
this is as close as we're going to get. Unfortunately, you can't refine
the selection in Preview. You have to do it all at once. You can't really zoom in either. So I
do it here and it works okay. But not great. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to Copy
and then I'm going to go to the Adjustment Tools here and blur everything. Except there is no blur.
So you're going to have to simulate a blur and it doesn't work very well. What I'm going to
do is take the Contrast down somewhat, maybe bring the sharpness down as well.
Maybe the Saturation a little bit. Take a little bit of the color out.
That kind of creates a blur. Doing it for the whole thing here so the subject is also has less
contrast. But remember that we copied the subject. Now I can Paste back on top , it's centered so
you're going to have to position manually right on top. Try to get it as close as you can.
It kind of works especially if you shrink the image down in size and you're looking
at a smaller image. Then it works a little bit better. You don't see the imperfections.
Now let me show you another way using Keynote that works pretty well but it's pretty convoluted.
Let's first start off by getting the exact pixel size here. So in Preview I can go to
the Information Panel here and under General it's 3088 by 2320. So in Keynote I'm going to create a
new presentation. I'm going to get rid of everything on the first slide. Go to Document and
I'm going to set the slide size to Custom Size and set it to exactly the size of the image. Then I'm
going to shrink down so we can see it here. Then I'm going to drag and drop the image into there.
Now it should snap right into place. If I go to Format, Arrange, you should see it at zero
zero. Now what I want to do first is to make it blurred. So I'll select it and there's no way
to blur it. You can go to image and do the same thing that you did in Preview here to kind of
fake a blur. But you could also, under Style, set the Opacity down to something like 20%. Then Copy,
click away and Paste. It will Paste another 20% transparent overlay. I'm going to move
it over by a few pixels. Like maybe ten pixels. So Shift and Right Arrow to move it ten pixels.
If I go to Arrange here you could see it's ten pixels to the right. I'm going to Paste
again and move that one ten pixels to the left. Paste again ten pixels Up. Paste again
ten pixels Down. So now we've got five versions of the same thing all citing
different positions. So when I zoom in you could see how it's kind of blurry. So far so good.
Now we need to put on top of this a cutout version of the subject. How to do that. There's really no
good way to do it with just the image. But we have the ability to create these custom shapes. Let's
zoom in here and start creating custom shapes by putting lots of points here all around the
subject. You can get as detailed as you want. Take a little bit more time than what I'm doing.
Notice how here I made a mistake. It's okay. Just keep going like that. You can fix the
mistakes. I'm not even going to be worried about being perfect here at the bottom.Just
going to get it to be all the way around and then to finish it off you've got to click on the first
point there. Now you've finished it. You can see there's a line there. I can go to Style
and I could set a fill, like a color fill if I want. It's a little bit easier if it's
set to No Fill. At the border maybe some color to make it really easy for me to see.
Like a red like that. I can adjust any point I want. So I can fix imperfections. Not only
that I can select a point and then hit the Delete key to get rid of it. So I can fix that mistake.
This mistake I can fix there and I can get this all the way down even below the bottom.
Like that. Then you can work on anything else you want. You can even click to add
more points like that. You can curve out any point you want. You can get really detailed.
So then when you're done you now have this shape here.
Now you may think, oh let's set the Fill to an image fill. But that actually doesn't really work
well. What works well is with the shape selected like that I can now drag and drop an image into
it. Then the image isn't going to fit perfectly. I have to reposition the image inside to get it just
right......and done. Now I want to get rid of that line, that red line. You don't need it anymore.
There I go. So now I've created this shape that's perfectly sized like the subject. I placed a copy
of the image there and then I have all these other images behind it that are kind of blurry.
The results are less than perfect but mostly because I rushed. If I took a lot of time
to actually work on the outline and to align everything perfectly it would look really good.
Now, of course, this is a Keynote Presentation which isn't what you want. You want to Export it
as an image right here and you could choose jpeg or png for even higher quality. I'm
probably going to stick with jpeg and then we'll export this to the Desktop.
I'm not going to bother to name it but you get a folder here and inside the folder you get this
image. I can take it out of the folder and get rid of the folder. You could see
here's the original image in QuickLook and then here's the version I made in Keynote.
So really if you want to do this kind of thing right you want to get an app like Affinity Photo
or Pixelmator Pro to do it. Of course you can also use PhotoShop or any other image editing
app. They all are going to have these basic tools in them. But if you really want to figure out a
way to do it using the tools that come with your Mac you can kind of simulate this with Preview
or Keynote by putting a little bit more effort into it if you don't mind the imperfect results.
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.