Photoshop On Mac : Creating Lens Blur Background

How to create a Lens Blur effect on the background of you photo.

How many of you out there owned a digital SLR camera? Well this tutorial is made for you who don’t have which are really crazy to have one.. and I’m one of them., soon I’ll get my own CANON 400D, perhaps. One of the most common function in digital SLR cameras today comes with Lens Blur, where you focus on an object infront while the background become blurish. But did you know this technic you can also create when you dont even have a DSLR camera, the answer.. Photoshop! Here I’ll share with you on how to create Lens Blur in Photoshop.

STEP 1 : First thing is to find a perfect photo, if you got your own photo collection captured with any digital camera or cybershot, just use it. In this tutorial, I choose this photos of my lovely beauty beloved wife which was taken at the Lok Kawi Wildlife Park near my place.

STEP 2 : Secondly you need to check if the photo is in ‘RGB’ mode. To do this go to (Image>Mode>RGB color) and then, go to your ‘Channels’ pallete (Window>Channels). Here you’ll see RGB channels which indicate the photo is set to RGB color mode. Now, create new channels by clicking the ‘Create new channels’ icon at the bottom of the Channels pallete. At this point, you’ll have a new channels call ‘Alpha 1′ with Black background color.

STEP 3 : Still on the Channels pallette, click the ‘eye’ icon on the RGB channels and you’ll see the entire photo change to reddish tone which indicate that’s a visual representation of the alpha channel.

STEP 4 : Now select a nice soft ‘Brush’ tool on the tools pallete (or press B) and set the fill color to White. While on the option toolbar at the top of your screen, set the Brush Size according to your desire (not to big and not to small) for this tutorial I choose 170, then set the opacity to 50%.

STEP 5 : Now gently paint the area you decide to focus. Means, I decided to focus on the middle part where the whole figure infront will be clearer while the background will become blurish. As you paint, you’ll see the middle part become clearer which means anything is red tone become blurry.

STEP 6 : At this point you should have you photo to be something like this.

STEP 7 : Lastly, comes the interesting part.. on the ‘Layers’ pallete, go to (Filters>Blur>Lens Blur) and ‘Lens Blur’ pallete will appear. Set the source to Alpha 1, then click Invert and adjust the Radius to get the blurry effect you desire. The more Radius you set the strong blurry effect you will get.

There you go! Checkout the photo in BEFORE + AFTER and see the Lens Blur effect, amazing isn’it!

Now go and snap more photos (it’s okay if you’re using only cybershot) and practice this simple tutorial using various types of photos till your friend wondering when was you bought a new DSLR camera..

He! He! Enjoy + Play, till next week then..