Silly photo "term" question

Are you referring to bokeh?

Bokeh is often dependent on the lens, but you can throw the background out of focus by using a larger apeture setting (f1.2 - f5.6, etc) for a shallow Depth of Field.

Of course, your apeture settings are dependent on the camera and the lens.

 

You can use the blur tool on Photoshop to get a somewhat similar effect.

 

Lucahjin ~ We'd love to help you figure out how to get the effect you're drawn to - can you link some pics in the Gallery as examples?

 

Ok, it looks like they used the gaussian blur filter on that pic.

 

Thanks for linking to an example. Yes, that effect could be achieved by applying a Gaussian Blur filter!

There really isn't a term for that particular look - because it's difficult to assess what exactly that look is - it could be a soft-focus filter, it could be Gaussian Blurred in software, or it could be a selective focus shot with a very shallow depth of field achieved by opening a lens up wide.

Here's an example of the latter -



Nikon D200 with a Nikon 85/1.4 Shot WIDE open at 1.4

 

I'd bet money there's also a touch of "Diffuse Glow" going on their as well.

 

Ah. Okay. I see what you're looking for. As Z said, there's different ways to achieve that look, through what I described earlier (opening up the lens), or using Photoshop or similiar processing tool to achieve that look.

Are you using photoshop?

You can probably Google terms like Diffuse Glow, Soft Glow, etc, and you should find a ton of information.

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/glow.shtml -- the first link that popped up when googling.

Good luck.

 

for a look like that or like this one (which im not sure exactly if thats what your looking for)


i used photoshop and i made a copy layer with hard light (or it might have been soft light) and then used Gaussian blur on soft/hard light layer
(i usually use this technique on pictures that i like but were a bit blurry and didn't want to dump them, hehe)

for a technique with the image in focus and everything blurred around it you can get that effect with photoshop as well.