TOPAZ STUDIO 2: Creative Blur (Part 1) FOCAL BLUR

today's episode is creative blur using topaz studio two this is part one of a two-part series the first part i'm dealing with the focal blur tool and the next part i'll be dealing with the motion blur tool today i'm going to show you three different examples of using creative blur and think lens baby i really love lensbaby lenses and i use those a lot but if you don't have a lensbaby lens man you can create these effects right using topaz studio 2 or photoshop or analog effects but today i'm centering in on topaz studio 2. so this is the first image we're going to work with here's our second image and here is our third image so we have three different examples just to show you how creative blur can really give you a nice artistic feel to your images by the way i'm working with stock images today and i'm going to link those in the description below so you can go ahead and download those and follow along with me and try this out for yourself it's a great way of learning the first thing i need to do is duplicate my background layer when you're working with uh topaz studio 2 because it doesn't do that for you and by the way in case you're wondering you know a lot of people say hey dave why don't you make a uh make this into a smart object well you can't use smart objects at this time with topaz products so hopefully that'll change in the near future i hope so but anyway there's my background layer and let's go ahead and come up the filter and we'll launch topaz studio 2 and get started and now that we're in topaz studio 2 let's click add filter and find the focal blur tool which is right here or the vocal blur filter whichever you like i'm going to click it and we have a nice blur already this is a really simple tool to use but it's very effective you know you have a blur slider here and a transition slider you have two different types of blurs a circular blur and a tilt and shift blur and i have another video where i've done a tilt and shift effect so you can go back and watch that i'll try to remember to link that at the end of the video so you can go and watch that and you also have this target right here and this is basically just turns on and off this target interface right here watch i'll turn it back on all right now this is simple to use you can go ahead and adjust the shape of this target here okay for instance in my case i want this center flower to be in focus okay and you can go ahead and adjust it to the shape of the of the part you want to keep in focus so this area in here will be the part in focus and everything outside of that circle will transition and go out of focus very beautifully and let's see here so let's take the um blur and we'll start to move it to the right but if you don't want to see this target tool in here just click this and it'll go away so let's take the blur and let's start to move this to the right and see how we can blur the background we can give it a super amount of blur which is way too much in my opinion but hey whatever mood you're in and whatever expression you want to give your image you're the artist you go ahead and do it but i'm going to think for my image i want to see some of those flowers in there but i just want a nice gentle soft blur in the background and again i'm trying to simulate a lensbaby effect where it has a sweet spot of focus and then you can come back at any time and bring that target tool back up again and you can you know readjust its shape very simple you know you can make it more circular oval shape however you want it and now let me show you something else let me shut off the target tool here let's take the transition tool and move it the whole way to the left and i'm going to zoom in on the image here so you can see it can you see this area right here is the blur area and here is the in focus area here and see how harsh that is when the transition tools is the whole way to the to the left let me move it to the right and you'll see it'll start to transition out and you just want to adjust that too it looks right for you let me zoom back out i'm just going to go ahead and get this just where i want it as you can see it's a really simple tool to use but look how beautiful it is i love the focal blur tool all right that's example one i'm happy with it i'm going to come up and click accept that'll send me right back into photoshop and now that we're here in photoshop let's shut this layer off so we started out with this image and we end up with this that little extra blur makes for a nice dreamy image you know one that i would be proud to hang on my wall let's move on to our second example so we have this image i love this image here but this is a type of an image it already has a nice dreamy look to it but it it screams out lens baby to me if i was out in the field taking this shot and i saw this water here with the reflection of these trees and i think it would look really nice and dreamy with a lens baby lens but i'm gonna simulate that right here using topaz studio too one thing i notice about this image that i don't like is this this area right here in the water this light spot and this light spot here so i'm gonna get rid of that so what i'm gonna do and you've seen me do this in the past if you watch my videos get a blank pixel there i'm going to get my spot healing tool make sure i have sample all theirs checked on and i'm just going to simply paint over these white splotches like this or these light pink splotches and just get rid of them because i think our eye's going to be drawn there and we're not going to like it so let's just clean that up real quick doesn't have to be perfect because remember it's going to go out of focus all right and that is good enough now we have to bring this all together stamp it together that's shift option command or control e depending if you're on a mac or pc remember we have to do that because we have to send this stamp layer into topaz studio too if we just sent layer 1 into topaz studio 2 it would just uh send these uh well let me show it to you here we just send these two healed spots into topaz studio 2 and we don't want that we want to blur the whole image so let's go ahead and launch topaz studio 2 and get blurring let's add our filter the focal blur filter or tool depending what you like and already it looks really cool right now we have to determine you know what do we want to be in focus and i like this tree right here to be in focus here now let's adjust the shape here we can move it around and let me just elongate it a little bit something like that isn't that beautiful beautiful beautiful see that we got rid of those white light spots and i think that's going to be nice and remember if you don't want to see the interface just click on the target tool and that goes away but isn't that nice now let's adjust our amount of blur see that like that's too much i think but whatever you like again it's up to you and let's check our transition we'll pour transition in so you can see that hard edge transition there definitely don't want that but let's just adjust the two it looks good and i'm thinking right like that and we can always come back and click this target here and readjust this a little bit if we need to make any changes that we like let me see what happens if i pull that in just a little bit yeah that looks really cool remember you can left click anywhere in this area here either on the image or on the canvas left click with your mouse hold it down there's the before the original and here's the after i really like it and that was super easy doesn't that look really dreamy let's go ahead and click accept and that'll send us back into photoshop so now that we're in photoshop here is the before really cool image and here is the after nice dreamy ethereal look and now on to our third and final image i wanted to give you three different examples of three different types of photography and show you how blur works on pretty much anything you throw at it now this image here i did a little bit of a crop it's an 8 by 10 crop on it just so you know in case your image looks a little different i cropped it that's all so now we're going to duplicate the background layer and let's go ahead and send this into topaz studio 2 and we'll do our final blur already add filter focal blur and now let's adjust the shape of our blur decide what we want and i think i'm going to come in really tight here i want a little bit of blur on this bag right here i think and the other thing i'm going to do is i think i might just pull this in a little bit more i'm even gonna little let a little bit of blur be on her um face and then i'll fix that in photoshop and i'll show you how to do that let me pull this in a little bit tighter something like that okay that looks pretty cool and let's shut off our target tool here and let's adjust the amount of blur we want let's adjust our transition i think something like that now again her face is out of focus have no fear though i'm going to fix that in photoshop all right very good now i think one last thing i want to do is add a slight amount of a vignette around this image i think it'll help so i'm going to use vignette here and uh that's good you know let's uh i'm just going to use the default setting here's the before and here's after just a little bit of a vignette i think really helps this all right so we're if we're happy with it let's click accept and send this right back into photoshop i'm going to go ahead and zoom in so we can really see this area on her face now i really love the blur around everything else on her pants on the backpack here but not on the hair and the face so what i'll do is just add a layer mask here make sure you have black paint make sure you have your brush tool up and i don't have my brush tool up now i do i'm painting with 100 opacity and a flow of 100 i'm going to use a nice soft brush hardness 0 and what i'm going to do is just simply paint her face back and get the blur off the face i don't mind a little bit of the hair being out of focus it kind of blends in really well with the rest of the image and i like that what do you think so let me shut off the layer mask if i hold the shift key down and click on the layer mask that shuts it off you see the x on there lets you know the layer mask is not being affected effective now let me turn it back on so there it is let me zoom back out very cool the only thing i don't like to see this little light area here it kind of bugs me so i'm going to put a blank pixel there there get my spot healing tool and just paint that and get rid of that that simple so we've come from here and one to here and we created that really nice lens baby effect all with the power of topaz studio 2 and the focal blur tool well there it is creative blur using topaz studio 2. now today this was part one so stay tuned for part two part one was the focal blur tool part two will be the motion blur tool all in topaz studio too so we can create different blurring effects i hope you enjoyed this tutorial today if you did 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 i want to thank each and every one of you for joining me today on 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: 2,118

Keywords: Topaz Studio, Topaz Studio 2, Creative Blur, Part 1, Focal Blur, Photography, Lens Baby Effects, Creative Editing, Digital Art, Soft Focus, Bokeh, Background Blur, Photo Editing, Photo Edit, Training, Photography Training

Id: CR6y2RUSQsE

Length: 12min 4sec (724 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021