Long Exposure Blur in Photoshop

hi everyone Laura Mackie here today I thought I'd show you how to make a long exposure of water in Photoshop before I had my neutral density filters I used to sometimes wanna have a silky effect in my water too and I'd watch everybody take them with their fancy filters at their cameras and I didn't have any so I would come back and I would figured out how to do it in Photoshop and when push comes to shove to make an artistic image sometimes it's just really nice to to try it out it also when I saw the results made me want to go out and get my filters so anyway that's what we're going to do today basically this is the original image that I imported from Lightroom it opens as a background layer so the first thing that I always do is I duplicate that background layer with a command or control J oops do that and turn off the original layer and the reason I turn it off is that I don't want to affect this bottom layer at all I want it to stay in case I mess up I have something to fall back on and then I won't have to go all the way back to Lightroom to find the original and import it again it's just right here and I can delete all other layers if I've messed up okay so let me show you what this image looks like after I've done the long exposure blur I'm going to go ahead I have a set of layers in this group here call I named blur and and you can see when I turn that on that's with the blur and I turn it off that's without the blur don't you think it looks a lot better and you can see the shadow here from the bridge and faintly some other shadows over here I think it looks I think it looks pretty good so that's what we're going to work on today and the final final image when I applied all the effects was this this is when I did the blur and I went ahead I adjusted the sky and then I applied an a texture on top that was like a radiant texture and so this was my final product I also lightened up these rocks a bit on the in the corner we're not going to go that far but I just wanted to show you this before this is after and some people may cringe but it's an artistic expression and also sometimes when I do this it really helps me hone my photoshop skills of selecting things and knowing what blend modes work and and so it's very helpful to try to just work with an image sometimes differently so that you can get better at Photoshop okay I'm gonna turn that off we're only going to be concerning ourselves with the blur right now so I like to always rename my layers and my groups and in this case I'm going to double click on the layer and I'm going to call it blur because that's what we're going to do we're going to blur just the water though so how do we do that we make a selection how do we make a selection we use the quick selection tool that's over here in your tool panel if you can't see this if you hold it down and if you happen to see the magic wand the way you see what's under all of these when there's like a little arrow you can see there's a tool here with a tiny little arrow and some of these have these arrows all almost all of them do actually all of them do so if you hold your click and hold you can see what's underneath each one in this case we're going to use the quick selection tool and you're going to come up top and you're going to make sure that you're in the plus and that means add a selection so I'm gonna come down here and I'm gonna start clicking and dragging in the water until it Photoshop then it says oh I'm gonna grab all this well it grabbed a little too much here and not enough over here so we're going to refine the selection before we actually apply the blur because we only want the water so I'm gonna zoom in here and when you're working in small little spots like over here see how Photoshop didn't grab that water well I want it to grab it so I'm gonna use my bracket key to make a smaller quick selection tool and click whoops click too much I'm gonna do that again I'm gonna zoom in and just click in here and make it even smaller when you're working in a small area you want to use a small quick selection tool you don't want it to be big because then it's going to take too much information here I want it to I don't want the pillar so I'm going to I'm holding my alt or option key and that's how I took away some of this information you'll see that if I hold the alt or option key down the circle in the center then it has a minus sign and that way as you're holding that alt or option key down you click and drag and it takes away information I'm going to do that again over here I increased my brush the quick selection tool size because it's a bigger area I hold my alt or option key down and I click and drag until it figures out what it wants to do here it took away too much and the reason why it's bouncing back and forth is that this horizon isn't that much different color than the water so it's having a little trouble figuring out like what I want so I just added that selection back in and it figured it out so I'm gonna come in here and click and hold my Alt alt or option key and click to deselect that part of the pillar it got that over here it took away too much so I'm going to increase my tool size click or and hold the alt or option key click and drag and voila now I think it needs a little more water over here and I do not want this boat blurred - right now it's included in the selection I want to take it out so I'm going to use my alt or option key click and drag and take that out now I can't deal with this tool isn't going to work with these teeny tiny little spaces in there we can do that manually if it really looks like I need to do it but for now I'm just looking now I'm panning around the image to see did it get good selection here it could use a little more water okay so that looks that looks pretty good okay so I'm going to do a command 0 or ctrl 0 that makes your image fit the Photoshop window now I don't want to recruit recreate the wheel I don't want to have to do the selection again so I'm gonna save the selection I'm going to come over here to my channels panel click the channels you see I have a bunch because I've been working with this - trying to practice my tutorial but it doesn't matter because I can save another selection I'm going to come down here to this little camera at the very very bottom when I hover over it it says save selection this channel I'm going to click that and it just put in another one here and they always are called alphas I've renamed some of them here and I'm going to do that again here I'm going to call it water new too because I want to be able to if I have to recall this election I want to just be able to click here I don't want to have to try to make all that selection again so now it's saved I'm going to go back to my layers click on the layer and now I'm ready to do my blur the best way to do a blur is with the blur path now some of you have made tried blurring before and you may have tried doing like a Gaussian blur a Gaussian blur works fine for some things but this is not one of them and I'll show you why if I choose this kind of blur you'll see it really it doesn't look so good you mean maybe in the beginning I think ooh that looks silky but that's very unnatural looking and even if I reduce the blur it just looks out of focus it doesn't look like a long exposure to me so I'm going to cancel that and I like to do path blur but let me show you something else if you're going to do remember we selected Gaussian blur if I select motion blur instead that's the right motion but when a motion blur does is it still pulls information from the rest of the image even though you are have a selection so I don't like twos motion blur either because it goes B it takes all this and then you have to monkey around with it I want to know the quickest and fastest most effective way to do this and that's the path blur so I'm going to go back up here to filter whoops filter and go to my blur gallery and there's some choices here and I'm going to choose path when I click path it's going to open up another window and you'll see over to the right the one that we selected is path blur and that's checked and you'll see that it it already has a default it was remembered maybe something I had done before and it puts this little arrow in here this blue you can change the length or the direction of your blur by pulling down the middle dots if you want you can change the direction by taking one of the ends I mean it's handy if you're trying to do clouds perhaps they're in a direction you know in an angle like this in that case you would maybe do like that but that's not good either because we want it to go straight level not not like that so whoops we're gonna go back head to the lair and I'm gonna go back to a blur panel or path blur I should say I accidentally hit escape and I didn't mean to do that okay so we're back here this is the default and it said this is the direction it's flat level from left to right and you can go over here and change your speed and you want to make sure it says centered if you unclick centered you'll see that it changes the way it blurs it and then the shadow of this tower isn't underneath so if you're working with water that has shadows you want to make sure that you've clicked over here on the right centered blur you don't want to change the the way it looks that would it's a telltale sign you want to do it as well as you can to make it seem as realistic as you can so I don't like to go too much speed because then that really doesn't look so real either to me I I want to make it look like you know I just a little bit of a long exposure nothing too dramatic so maybe around 85% I think that looks that looks pretty good and the taper you don't need to worry about that for this but you can play with it another time for this task for long exposure waters this is really all you need to do is the speed and make sure it's centered blurred and then up here you want to make sure at the top you want to make sure that you have preview checked otherwise if it's unchecked you won't see anything so if you don't see anything make sure you check your preview and then you want to make sure your solo should lead as at zero and then click okay so now Photoshop put this blur it put it right inside the selection it didn't make a layer mask or anything I so you if you were to go back and try to find you know a layer mask for this you're not going to find it it just went ahead and apply that effect to the area inside the selection now I'm going to deselect by command or control D and I'm going to zoom in because I want to see how the selection looks did I miss any place remember we talked about this area around the boat that it probably wasn't going to get well it's so minor I'm not gonna bother fixing it that it didn't get that time a little part in between I think it looks pretty good I'm assuming in I'm just going to go along that water's horizon I'm just looking to see if I see anything nope looks good to me so there you have it that's how you do a long exposure to the water I hope you enjoyed this and I look forward to seeing some of your images with this effect thanks for watching

Channel: Laura Macky

Views: 7,497

Keywords: photoshop, photo editing, lightroom, photography, adobe, long exposure, blur, tutorial, path blur

Id: IYV8E7OjpHw

Length: 12min 22sec (742 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 16 2018