Blurring background in Photoshop

Wow, this is really helpful! I have been wondering what the trick was to blurring just a specific area and it turns out it seems like a simple process! Thanks for posting this!

 

This is great. I was looking at some pictures just yesterday that had blurring in them and wondered how it was done. Now I just have to get my hands on a copy of Photoshop. I have Photoshop Elements, but I don't know if it is compatible with my Windows 8 computer. >.< Guess I should track it down. Thanks again for providing this tutorial. I will be bookmarking it for future reference.

 

Thanks for the tutorial! I thoght this effect was just for fancy cameras, good to know!

 

No matter how much I learn of photoshop there's new things I didn't know. Thanks a million! This will help me a LOT. (specially because both me and my camera suck)
Thanks a lot!

 

thanks for the tutorial! there are a lot of things to learn for Photoshop.. always.. lol

 

Thanks a lot for this! There's still a lot more I need to learn in PS. Haha.

 

The most recent versions of Photoshop have a way of doing this that better approximates the look of having shot with a wider aperture lens. It's still a lot of work. You basically make a new transparency layer where you "paint" a depth map in greyscale (black for near, white for far away), then use Filter->Blur->Lens Blur and select the transparency layer under where it says "Depth Map". This particular filter lets you fine tune the depth you want to represent the in-focus distance, as well as pick things like the number and roundedness of the virtual lens's aperture blades.

There is a good tutorial for this filter here, but note that their bottom example has a poorly constructed depth map, they should have used a gradient for the ground and then colored the people to match the grey value of the point on the ground where they are standing.

http://www.psdbox.com/tutorials/photoshop-depth-maps-realistic-depth-of-field

 

Thanks! That's great!!
Only one question: I can't see the second part about blurring (can't see the picture), am I the only one? :P

 

Thank you for the tutorial,really helpful.

 

Thank you! Very helpful!

 

No, it's not just you, it's been showing as a missing image icon for a while now. But the originals are all still on the OP's deviantart page: Photo editing tutorial Part 2: Blurring background

 

Thank you so much *-*

 

Rather than using the burn/dodge tool, I tend to create a layer of light/dark colors and use blend modes to achieve the effect. The nice part about that method is you can adjust the opacity of the layer to further tweak it. Same with levels; I use a Levels adjustment layer. But there's always more than one way to achieve similar results and it's up to the user I suppose

 

The tutorial is very helpful, thank you!

 

Thank you, cian! Part one is really a good tutorial on it's own and I don't know any doll owner who doesn't love the blur background look for certain moments in the story. You make it so clear to learn with the steps.