How To Blur A Background In Lightroom (Realistically!)

blurring the backgrounds of your photos doesn't need to be a long and complicated process and I want to show you how to do it super easily here in Lightroom hello friend my name is Brendan from bewill creative.com and this is a photo we'll be working with today here within the develop module we're going to add a couple of selective adjustments to the background to quickly add a background blur without the complicated steps that you might think are required in this process so the first thing that we'll do is go to our masking icon then we'll go to the background selection and that will create a new mask around the entire background now if I zoom in you can see that a couple areas are not being selected and that's okay we'll go and touch that up afterwards for now we're just going to set the canvas for our background blur if you will now when you think about a actual background blur from a photo taken with a white aperture it gradually transitions from in focus to out of focus so if you just add a single mask for the entire blur it's not going to work very well so instead to add a more realistic look we can add a linear gradient at the bottom so that the blur transition into more intensity as the photo goes further into the background that sounds a little bit complicated but it's actually really easy with that mask selected just go to subtract and then go down to linear gradient now we're creating a linear gradient that's going to subtract from our background mask as you can see here as I continue to drag the gradient that red area becomes less and less visible so wherever the red area is either not visible or slightly visible that's where the effect or our blur effect is going to gradually transition away so I'm going to place this somewhere like this so we have most of our foreground that will not be affected by our blur adjustment now with our mask complete it's time to add our blur effects with two sliders the first thing that we'll do is go to our Clarity slider and just go and drag that down I'll zoom in a little so you can see exactly what's going on in the background as I drag down the clarity it just softens some of the detail so if you just use the clarity slider you can get sort of a subtle background blur with this method now if you want to take this one step further and have the background blur a little bit more dramatic we're going to go to the detail section and click on the sharpness slider and now bring this down and this is where the blur actually becomes quite intense if I zoom in here you can see how a lot of the buildings are a lot more blurred than before just moving the sharpness slider up and down you can see that big difference that that one slider creates so after you mess around with some of those adjustments and you are happy with the amount of blur that you have it's now time to go back and refine your mask because in my case you can see there's parts of this building back here that are not fully blurred like the other areas and there are some parts between her arms and things that are not blurred as well so we need to go and add to our mask with a brush to do that we'll once again make sure that we're using the same mask as before and go to add and then brush now with auto mask enabled here that means that Lightroom will do a good job to stick within the edges that you're painting essentially we're going to just go and paint over the areas that we want to apply this blur to so I'll continue to paint around all these areas around the subject here as well and depending on how well the background selection process was you'll have more or less work during this stage now if you notice that there are like little pixely blocky looking things in the background just disable auto mask and then that will help fix those up because Lightroom is essentially just selecting extra little things that it thinks is an edge we don't want that so I'll just disable it for the background and then I'll re-enable it in a moment when I go and paint around her arms now I'm going to go by her arms and since I have this clear Edge I'm going to now enable auto mask and so that way I don't have to worry about accidentally going over the edge and blurring the parts of my subject here so instead I can just focus right on the background if you make a mistake just press command or Ctrl Z to undo that no problem so now with all of my masking adjustments complete I had to go through a few areas there just to touch it up with the brush I have now successfully added that background blur and now there's a couple ways that we can adjust this once you're completed the process to refine it as needed so for example let's say that I'm not happy with the amount of blur I can always just go back to my sliders here I can adjust the sharpness or the clarity to get a slightly different looking background blur now if you're not happy with the perspective of the blur the depths of field of that blur all we have to do is adjust the linear gradient so I'll just bring down the clarity and sharpness once again so this is a little more obvious and I'll click on my linear gradient now I could just click and drag this wherever I want and I'll zoom in so you can see this a little better but if I move this up a little further you can see how it starts to remove some of the blur in more areas of my background but then as I bring this further down it starts to add more blur to those areas you can then soften this out just by extending the size of this gradient like so this way you have total customization over your blur effect and you can create that fake depth of field all within Lightroom you don't have to go into Photoshop at all so as you can see adding a background blur in Lightroom is actually pretty straightforward however there are some limitations with getting like perfect selections around hair and things like that and in that case if you have a really specific Edge or a detailed Edge that you need to add a background blur around then I recommend that you use Photoshop for this process instead I share how to do that in a step-by-step guide right here so you can just click this video and I'll walk you through the entire process of adding a background blur but this time in Photoshop

Channel: Brendan Williams

Views: 99,702

Keywords: how to blur a background in lightroom, masking tools in lightroom, fake background blur, blur photo in lightroom, depth of field effect, realistic background blur lightroom, lightroom classic tutorial, beginner lightroom tutorial, select background lightroom

Id: vRI8glvT7ow

Length: 5min 36sec (336 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 01 2023