How to Blur Backgrounds in Photoshop Automatically Using the Depth Blur Neural Filter – 2021

How to Blur Backgrounds in Photoshop Automatically

Learn to Blur Backgrounds in Photoshop automatically with just one click. The Depth Blur Neural Filter initially blurs your image for you. Use the Depth Blur options to further refine your blur. Create a Depth Map to use in with Photoshops Lens Blur.

How to Use Depth Blur Neural Filter

Today, I’m going to show you one of the newest tools and Photoshop that lets you blur the backgrounds automatically of any photo. It’s the depth blur neural filter. to get to our depth blur. Let’s come up here to filter neural filters. Click on depth blur. If you’ve never used the depth blur, you might see where it says new and you need to click on this cloud icon to download to depth blur filter.

One thing to note, when you click on the depth blur button, you’re going to see a blue circle spinning at the top of the screen. That’s because the image is processed in the cloud and sent back to your computer. So that means that you need to have the latest version of Photoshop running, plus be connected to the Internet.

So Photoshop is done with the blur. And down here, there is a preview changes option a before and after button. Here there is the before and there is the after. It did a pretty good job. So now let’s go over some of the options. Up here at the top there’s something called depth map resolution, and high is recommended. And I’ll go back to this option later and I’ll explain where we can use that.

Next, we have this thumbnail here, and there is something called focal point. So that’s where we can mark with the mouse, click the area that we want to be focused. So this is something we can also do with the parameter focal distance. And we can do that manually with that. So focal distances down here, I say you can do that manually or you can click and put your mouse right over an area that you want to be in focus. So if you click focal distance, grays out and then you start to see the wheels spinning at the top. That’s because this process is going on all over again.

So every time you make a change, your image is going to be processed in the cloud and sent back to your computer. And I can click remove focal point and you see focal distance. You can change that manually again. So the next option, blur strength allows you to choose the amount of blur that you want in your photo. Focal range is a depth of field we want to give the photograph. And we already touched on focal distance.

I might add it at the top up here, there’s a reset parameter. And once you hit that, all these are the default values right here. I like the default values as they are. So we won’t make any changes to those. But these options here, Haze, warmth, brightness, and saturation. All allow the color of the blurred area to be changed more intensely.

And this last option here, output depth map only will come back to that. And down here, more output options, current layer, duplicate layer, duplicate layer mask, new layer, and smart filter. What you’re probably going to be using most is the duplicate layer mask. So we’ll check that and say, OK.

So now that we have a layer mask, we can look at our image, and maybe there are some areas that we do not want to be blurred. So what we can do is click on our layer mask and use our brush tool B for the brush tool in any area that we do not want to be blurred anymore. We can paint it out with a brush tool. I’m going to use this example over here of this area of the chair. I’m going to paint with black my layer mask selected and just paint away the areas that I want to be in focus.

And you can go around your whole image and it’ll be different for every image. And just paint way, the blur. And if you make a mistake, just hit X on your keyboard and paint the area back in. And we can just go around the image and see if there are any areas that we want to be painted back in. Brush them away.

And sometimes they’ll be areas where it looks like there’s a little bit of overlap or something due to the blur. And you can fix that and create a new layer and clip that new layer two layers below. And with your brush tool, you can sample colors next to that area and kind of blend that in. And you could just find areas on your image where you want to do that.

So one of the last things we need to do is add a little bit of noise in the blurry background. And click on the thumbnail and come up here to filter noise, add noise. And something like 4.8 is good. You could see the noise back here in the blurred area that we just did and just say, OK. So that’ll make it look a little bit better in an overall image. And so if we look at our image, I can group these two together. And here is the before and the after. So this is a good tool if you need to do some blurring pretty quickly.

How to Use a Depth Map With Lens Blur

Let’s go back into our depth blur neural filter. One of the options I want to show you. So filter neural filters. And let this run through its initial blur processing in the cloud. When that gets done, I’m going to click on this output depth map only. So now I’m going to come down here and check output depth map only. And so what a depth map is. It’s basically an area, in this case, for Photoshop a map of the areas that will be in focus and out of focus.

So I’ll say, OK, and here’s a new layer with a depth map that Photoshop has added to this image here. I’m going to duplicate my background layer. With a depth map layer selected, go-to channels, hold down command and click on the RGB channel and come down here and create a new channel. Make sure that your foreground colors white and hit option delete to fill with white.

Now we’ll go back to our Layers panel. And we will select our duplicate layer. We don’t need this selection anymore, so we’ll say Command + D. I’ll come up here to filter, blur and lens blur. It’s now up here where it says depth map source. Make sure in this case it was alpha1. Make sure that is selected. And I can hit the set focal point.

So I just need to click on the canvas where to set that point? I’m going to click on her face right here. So that is in focus. The background is not in focus. If I click over here, you see this background becomes more in focus and she is out of focus. So you need to set that. And you can change all these other values any way you like. I just wanted to show you how you can use the depth map from your depth blur neural filter. And once I say, OK, and there is the before and there’s after. You see that blurred it.

So now we don’t need this map anymore. We can actually delete it, delete it there, and let’s show another use of our map. Go back to channels. We still have the selection. So if I hold down CMD and click on the alpha1 channel and go back to my layers, and now if I make a curves adjustment layer, you can see that my depth map is actually in my curves adjustment layer mask.

And I’m still using my depth map to darken the areas in the background. Little by little. So something like that. You want to know more about Photoshop, click or tap on one of the videos on the screen now If you haven’t already, subscribe like, and share this video. Thanks for watching. And remember, it’s never too late to learn. See you in the next video.

Read the previous blog article here 👉 How to Easily Get Started with Shapes in Photoshop

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