Create Realistic Bokeh Effects:PHOTOSHOP LENS BLUR FILTER (With Depth Map)

today i'll show you how to add a realistic bokeh effect to any image by using a depth map with photoshop's lens blur filter plus i'll show you how to quickly and easily create your own depth map i'll even give you a free action to speed things up even more stay tuned hello everyone and welcome to the joy of editing with dave kelly i love adding bulk effects to images because i think it can take an image that's just kind of okay and turn it into something kind of special recently i've done a couple videos showing you how to use the depth blur neural filter in photoshop and i like that filter but it has one big drawback and that is if you have an image with some noise it will not add noise to the out of focus areas which looks kind of fake and i'll show you that here in a second but it also has a very cool feature to it and i don't think most people even realize how cool of a feature this is and that feature is the ability to create a depth map now you may not know what a depth map is but by the time this tutorial is over you'll understand what a depth map is and how you can utilize it for your advantage so let me show you i'm going to go ahead and come up to filter and let's go to neural filters and i'm going to go ahead and launch the depth blur filter so we're just going to come to depth blur make sure we're selected and turn it on now it takes a few seconds to do its thing because it's going up into the cloud and applying the background bokeh blur effect to the image and now here's result and it did a really nice job but check this out i'm going to zoom into the image so you can really see something here do you see the uh grain in the uh face of my model and on the rest of the body and the clothing and so on but look there's not a lick of green in that background so that looks very unrealistic you know from a distance it looks okay but if you're going to go ahead and print this out it would look very unnatural and as great as this filter is and no matter what kind of a great job it does it's unusable wouldn't you say because we need that grain in the background now i want to show you something really amazing about this filter and that is you see this section right here it says output depth map only watch what happens when i click this on you'll see this image that i have it's a black and white image shades of gray black and white this is a depth map in other words it maps out the image this area that is darker is closer to us the darkest areas are the closest to us and things get a little more gray till they reach white as things go off into the distance but this particular depth blur filter can create a depth map and it does a really good job it's not 100 perfect but you can fix things that aren't perfect like you see this area right here protrudes out from her head a little bit that's a little mistake but i'll show you how i can fix that but that's not a problem we're photoshop people right and we know how to correct things okay so check this out this is our depth map now i don't have to care about any of these adjustments here in fact they're all grayed out i couldn't adjust them if i wanted to once i click on output depth map it simply and easily makes us a depth map how does it do it i don't know but it's part of the creative cloud artificial intelligence thing all we need to do and usually what i do is output to a duplicate layer now you have different choices in here but i just say output to a duplicate layer and just click ok and when you do that here we are back in photoshop and there is our depth map now how do we use this let me show you how now pay close attention to what i'm going to do but i'm going to give you an action that all this work that i'm showing you how to do will be done for you with one click of a button but but follow this through it's good to learn what's actually happening here what i need to do is take this layer and turn it into a channel which will be our depth map now make sure you have your channels pellet open if you don't open it up before i turn this into a channel you see this area right here this little protrusion i need to fix that before i turn this into a depth map all i need to do to fix that is get a brush tool i'm just going to type b that's a shortcut for the brush tool have a decent size brush this size is good with a nice soft edge i'm going to sample this color by holding the option or alt key down this light color right here and just simply paint over that little protrusion just like that with that soft edge that's all i really need to do now i can save this out as a depth map here's what we need to do make sure the depth map layer is selected hold your command or control key down and come to the channels pellet and you see the first uh channel here which says rgb hold your command or control key down and click on rgb and that turns that into a selection then all you need to do is come here see where the plus is click the plus that adds it to an alpha channel now nothing happens yet except we have a selection here but here's the next step use the shortcut shift delete which opens up your fill dialog box make sure your content is set to white and if it's not you can click the drop down and make sure white is checked on and click ok and just like that you've added that depth map it's called alpha one now you can come here and click it or double click it and call it depth map if you want to just so you know that that's what it is and now you can deselect this that's command or control d to deselect that and now you've made your depth map now remember i'm giving you an action that'll do all this for you you'll be able to do this all with a click of a button now simply come to layer one let's delete it click on make sure that layer selected click the trash can that deletes it and then duplicate the background layer that's command or control j to duplicate it at this stage of the game we have our depth map created now we can go ahead and launch the lens blur filter make sure you're on this new layer layer one and click filter and let's come to blur and you'll find lens blur right here click on lens blur and i'll show you how this works this is a very sophisticated filter and there's a lot to it so this video would get too long if i showed you everything but today i'm going to show you radius and distribution and this is where we distribute noise across the out of focus parts of the image there's also a feature called blade curvature and specular highlights which deals with how this interacts with highlights on your image and i'll show you that in another tutorial but today we're going to look at radius which deals with how how out of focus the background is and distribution where we can distribute noise to the background to really sell this bokeh effect i'm going to go ahead and turn this radius the whole way up to 100 and give us maximum blurs just so you can really see what's happening here now right now depth map is set to source none now remember i made a depth map and i'm going to use it so let's click this drop down and let's choose depth map and when i do that you'll see that already the image is starting to look better now my model is still out of focus but you see this section right here where it says set focal point and also blur focal distance if i take the slider and drag it i can change the focal distance or this set focal point little icon right now is checked on and you see my little see my uh pointer with that square with the crosshatch now if i click on her eye i'm setting the focal distance when i click that now you'll notice her face will come right into focus and now i have this beautiful image with an out of focus background and i have noise in the background because i have this distribution set to uniform and monochromatic now i'm going to zoom in so you can actually see the noise i'll go ahead and zoom into uh 200 so you can really see this noise and you see that noise in the out of focus area really nice now you'll notice that the noise in the darker areas of the out of focus areas are there's a lot more noise prevalent than error in the lighter areas and that's natural that's the way noise actually would appear when you're shooting with your camera now we have to match the noise of the background to the actual in focus areas of the image to do that i recommend that you zoom in to around 200 percent now if we look at our model here we can see some noise here there's more noise on the background than is on the model so that's this amount here so i'm going to change this amount from three let's let's change it to well if i go to zero you'll see there's no noise and that doesn't look good right let's try it's a little sensitive let's try two and see what we get there's two now i think that match is pretty good and a lot of times what i like to do you have your choice between uniform noise and gaussian noise so i try both just to see which one gives me the better result now gaussian usually looks a little stronger than uniform in this case i think uniform is going to be good and yeah i think that matches up pretty good let's try one i'm just going to type in a 1 and see what i get here give it a second to render out one's not quite enough so i think i need a two so i'm just gonna type two and i find either one two or three is really what gets you good results and you also have your choice between monochromatic when it's checked on or color noise when it's checked off and i generally just use monochromatic i seem to get the best results with monochromatic let's go ahead and fit this screen if you come to the lower left side of the interface click here and fit in view give it a second or two to render out and there we go now we can take a look at it now it looks really nice now if you click this preview here you can see there is the before and click it again here's the after so i really like these results very realistic if you wanted less blur you could take this radius and you could cut it back if you wanted to but in our case i think i'm going to leave it up at 100 percent i think it really looks good there and if you're happy with everything at this point all you need to do is click ok and that'll send us right back into photoshop so here is our before and here's our after but it's that easy to get realistic uh bokeh effects on your image using the lens blur filter along with a depth map which we got from the neural depth blur filter i just noticed i missed the piece of our pants right here an easy fix just get a layer mask and get a brush with black paint make sure you're painting with black paint and i'm going to go with a smaller brush at 100 opacity and just paint the pants back in right there just that simple i overshot it i'll just change the white paint and fix that little section right there and that fixes that now let me show you how to use the action that i'm going to give you i'll leave a link in the description below this video where you can download this action now once you download the action open up the folder that it's in and double click on the action and that will install it into your photoshop actions and by the way photoshop can be open at this time now let me show you how to use that action let me start you from the beginning pretend we want to add a nice bokeh background to this image so what we're going to do is come up to filter go to neural filters and then we want to open up the depth blur filter we're going to simply check off output depth map only click on that we're going to see a depth map come up here make sure your output is set to a duplicate layer click ok that'll bring us right back into photoshop with this depth map and then all you need to do at this point is is you can repair anything you need to repair in the depth map because remember this protrusion here i painted on here to fix it you can do any of that kind of stuff you want but then when you're ready to send this into the lens blur filter to add the actual lens blur onto it what you need to do is open up your actions come to the depth map section under the joy of editing group it'll be inside the joy of editing group depth map make sure you have depth map selected click play it'll run that action okay it basically duplicates the background layer that's all it does but it also creates a depth map for you so now when you open up the lens blur filter well that depth map will now be available for you well there it is everyone give this a try i think you're going to like it it's easy to do and i think the action will really help you out hey if you enjoyed the tutorial today please give it a like and share it with your friends and if you're not yet a subscriber to my channel please subscribe click that bell notification icon then every time i upload a new tutorial you'll be notified about it i want to thank each and every one of you for joining me today in the joy of editing with dave kelly i'll see you all right here next time but until then happy editing [Music] you

Channel: The Joy of Editing with Dave Kelly

Views: 1,554

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Photoshop, Lens Blur, Lens Blur Filter, Photography, Photo Editing, Depth Map, Bokeh, Bokeh Effects, Neural Filter, Depth Blur, Training, Tutorial, The Joy of Editing with Dave Kelly

Id: HWH7jDRxxik

Length: 13min 24sec (804 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 29 2021