Use Photoshop To Blur Out Backgrounds

[Music] hey everyone Steve from backcountry gallery here and this time around I want to show you a Photoshop trick for blurring out your backgrounds now I know it's been a while since I've done a photoshop tip so try not to fall out of your seat Oh before we begin remember that if you enjoy this video the best way to say thank you is to share it with your friends and a big thank you to everyone who does share these videos I really appreciate it thank you very much now see I don't know about you but I'm a sucker for a nice soft clean background the problem is you typically need a fast lens on a full-frame camera to really pull it off however there are scores of folks out there shooting like f56 2f 6.3 glass sometimes even f/8 glass if you're using teleconverters and that's a recipe for busy backgrounds now don't get me wrong no Photoshop trick is gonna replace the look of a 600 f4 and a d5 however this little technique and certainly help if you don't have access to that kind of gear for example here's a before and after image from my D 500 and a 200 to 500 f56 in the first image I thought the background was just a bit too distracting so I added a little blur to make the subject stand out better here's another example with the D 500 and 200 or 500 I really didn't like the way the background looked in this one so I softened it up just a bit and I liked the result much better than the original now before we begin full disclosure this really isn't a technique I use very often simply because I usually shoot full frame and fast glass still I know that many folks out there simply can't justify that kind of investment and this technique can give you a similar look without dropping 18,000 dollars or more on gear to pull it off now when I do use this technique I use it in a very subtle way I find it's very easy to really overdo it resulting in an image where the subject seems cut out of the background my advice is to use this technique to simulate what the image would have looked like with a lens that was maybe another stop or two faster than the one you were using you want the end result to look believable so with all that in mind let's swing around of the computer and I'll show you how to do it oh and by the way yes as with like every Photoshop technique ever there are probably a dozen other ways to do it but I'm going to show you the way I like to do it okay so here's our sample image it's a Caracara I photographed in Costa Rica last year and he was really cool we were able to pull up right next to him in the car I was using my 200 to 500 on my d5 at 320 millimeter and even though I was shooting FX but f 5.6 kind of worked against me a little bit here I wish this background was rendered a little bit softer I probably would have been better off to have grabbed my 300 PF but at the time I wanted the flexibility of the zoom however as you can see these horizontal lines from the trees back there are a little bit distracting my eye tends to go from the bird back to those I'm kind of jumping around a little bit here so what we're gonna do is we're going to blur this background out a little bit so the bird stands out a little bit better from it so let's go ahead and get started with that now if you look over here as you can see I have been working on the image a little bit already now if I'm gonna soften a background I usually do it after I get some of my preliminary work done first although you really can do it at any point you like now the only exception to that is if you are planning on doing some noise reduction that should always be your first step anyway although no matter what get noise reduction out of the way before you do the blur step and you'll see why here in a minute so let's go ahead and get started with this the first thing we want to do is we want to create a composite layer now we can do that in a number of ways if you're only working off the background layer at this point if you haven't put any other work into the project go ahead and hit command or control J and that'll duplicate your background layer for most of us if you already have some work done you're gonna want to make a composite layer and you do that by hitting command option shift + E and that will go ahead and give you a composite layer our next step is to select the bird now there's a hundred ways to select stuff and I'm not going to go over everything here in the video I'm just gonna do it really quick and dirty here you can select using your quick select tool or however you know your last do whatever you like to do I have the very newest version of Adobe Photoshop at least at the time of this recording and there's a cool feature under the select menu that you can use sometimes called subject if you have a subject that's more or less isolated this works pretty good watch I'll show you I'm gonna click it and Adobe Photoshop is gonna go in think about it and it's gonna select my burden actually it did pretty well now the thing was selecting for this particular procedure is that the more blur you're gonna plan to put in the background and the busy of the background is you know you gotta kind of think about them both the more particularly you have to be about your selection in this case there's nothing terribly terribly busy around the bird himself so a rough selection is all you need and you'll see why here in a minute so let's go ahead and separate him from the background separate what we have here from the background just gonna zoom in here make sure we do have a pretty decent selection I'm gonna clean it up a little bit with my quick select tool here any place that looks like it could use a little bit of refinement I see that it's kind of missing it here a little bit again this does not have to be exact we're missing his foot a little bit here but that's not super important I want to make sure that this is selected as well I wanna I don't want to blur out the pull although I can fix that afterwards now we do have a few flyaway feathers down here and over here but we'll be able to fix those after we do this step again if you were doing a lot of heavy blurring you would have to worry about using maybe the selecting mask tool to go ahead and really get all of those little flyaways for what we're doing here for this example we're gonna skip that it doesn't really matter for the way this one's gonna work out so the next step is to go to the layer menu and do a new layer via cut we don't want copy we want cut that'll bring him off of this background layer and if you look at the layer palette over here you can see that there's now two different ones let me demonstrate for you here if I click that it's just the bird and if I click that it's just the background and that's what we want what you're gonna do is select this background layer right here not the one that says background with the one that you just cut the bird from or the animal from and that's the one we're gonna want to blur okay so I'm going to go ahead and zoom down a little bit here so we can see the whole bird next we go to the filter menu to do our actual blurring and gonna go to blur gallery and select field blur that's my favorite for this and what we're gonna do is grab a little handle right here and just kind of bring this up and you can watch the background he gets a glow around him but when you release it it looks normal and you can kind of see the difference here I'll uncheck the preview there so you kind of see how you're doing there what you want to do is get just enough blur to accomplish what you're after but not go crazy with it when you go crazy with it it can look really bad so let me show you here so in this case it actually doesn't look terrible but I think it's too much in some cases you'll find that it really really gets unbearable and you also can introduce a lot of posterization and banding and things like that so just try to keep it realistic that's that that's how I do it I try to make it look like maybe I shot an f4 lens instead of a five six as a side note to this I know a lot of people think maybe I can just crank this all the way up and then I'll just choose opacity to kind of bring it back down later in the regular editing area in Photoshop maybe I'll just drop the opacity of that layer and let some of the sharpness show through what I found is that can give it kind of a weird look it kind of has a sharp but soft look and not in a good way not like some glowy cool way but like gee what's wrong with the guy his lens way so what you want to do is make sure that whatever blur level you set in here is really the one you want don't overdo it intending to drop the opacity later just pick something that looks good take a look at it if you decide that it's not right you can always you know redo this I suppose if you want so I'm gonna put mine right about here and I think that looks pretty good if we check and uncheck we've gotten rid of the hard horizontal lines that you see here and we've softened those up pretty nicely so I'm gonna go ahead and go with that you can still see there's a background it looks realistic and then once you're done just hit OK and there we go but we're not finished yet we still have to do a little bit of refinement to this image we still have a few steps left now this particular image I'm gonna be able to use just a black brush and a layer mask to sort of bring back some of these flyaways you can see that some of we lost some of our flyaway feathers here and we lost some stuff down here by the tail to the blur layer there but we can go ahead and fix that all we need to do is add a layer mask to the layer we're working on our if you want to call it that where I take a brush with a black foreground color and make sure opacity is at a hundred percent again like I say you don't want to do this in little half pieces you want to make sure that it's either all or none otherwise it can kind of look weird the sharpness can kind of look a little bit weird and I'm just gonna take this brush and just kind of gently bring these back some of these feather areas here and I realize that we're bringing back some of the background and we're bringing back a little bit of the noise that went with it and that's okay because we're actually believing not gonna have to add noise back into this to make everything work so I'm gonna bring this down I'm just gonna trace this out here so I'm pretty easy to do and just kind of gently go along the edge of him here basically just outlining the bird now the trick here is if you had a really detailed background or using a heavy amount of blur or both you would have had to have made a much better selection of the bird this technique of just kind of tracing the outlines there and catching all the little feathers and flyaways and things like that does not work as well if your background is really super busy you have to really get in there and use your refine edge mask and really get a good selection as I had said before but in this case it works pretty well now as you can see we have a super smooth background that blur actually eliminated every bit of noise in the background but in some cases that actually becomes a major problem depending on how high your ISO was when you shot the image your tonal range might be really really narrow and the image actually can't handle having absolutely zero noise back there what'll happen is you'll see all sorts of like banding and posterization and it look really ugly so what I do is I end up adding noise back into the image this is why it's critical to do your noise reduction before you get to this step because we're actually not going to use this as a noise reduction step at all even though it looks like you could we're gonna add our noise back in and bring the noise level back to where it was when we started and again the reason for this is that if you don't do it you risk having posterization their images you'll maybe convert this to a JPEG and a pic JPEG and then you'll say gee why is there so you know some weird banding in the tonal transitions and that well that's why because there's not enough tonal range to handle it and the noise will help keep that from happening so let's go ahead and what you want to do here is click the actual blur layer and we're gonna go to filter noise and we're gonna add noise and what we're gonna do is make sure you're using Gaussian and monochromatic and we're just gonna add noise in until we can see that it pretty much matches these little tiny noisy areas we see right along the bird there so I'm gonna go ahead and raise this up I'm just gonna use my arrow keys my up arrow because you don't want to do this all at once if you drag it over it's just gonna get really really noisy really quick you won't be able to control its they need to do it like this most of the time I don't even need one percent there we go that's looking pretty good I'm it going a little too far there I got excited there we go that looks pretty good and again a little bit of noise back there I know it drives people nuts keep in mind we're also looking at this at 200% but I know it drives people nuts but I'll tell you what it really does help with posterization and banding so there we go and as you can see it 100% the noise doesn't look bad at all it looks great I would be happy to print this pretty much any size I'd want and there we go there's the final image and no posterization you see no banding in the background there everything looks good and that's the basic technique and before we go here let me share the before-and-afters here this is what we had when we started and that's what we have now much cleaner much smoother background the bird really stands out just watch how the bird looks when you turn that on and off he really kind of pops out now your eye goes there it doesn't try to go into the background at all from here I would just go ahead and finish my post-processing work and finalize the image so there you go again I want to stress that this technique is best done in small doses and can look contrived if you take it too far of course in order to use any Photoshop technique you need to start with great images right out of the camera and that's where my ebooks secrets to the nikon autofocus system secrets to stunning wildlife photography and coming soon secrets to the nikon exposure system come in all the books are jam-packed with hundreds of tips tricks and tech to help bring your photography to the next level the books themselves are very good at taking complex topics and making them easy for anyone to understand finally remember to subscribe to the channel and make sure you stop by my site and sign up for my free email newsletter so you never miss an article or a video thanks again for watching have a great day you

Channel: Steve Perry

Views: 36,459

Keywords: photography tips, photography help, Backcountry Gallery, Steve Perry, nature photography, photoshop tips, photoshop blur backgrounds, how to blur backgrounds, blur backgrounds in wildlife shots, shallow depth of field, creamy backgrounds, create bokeh in photoshop, blur out distracting backgrounds

Id: 3_14WN-fStc

Length: 13min 57sec (837 seconds)

Published: Fri May 11 2018