SUPERB Technique for Blurry Bokeh Background

Learn how to get that buttery bokeh without having an expensive lens on your camera. You can use Photoshop to get as much Bokeh for your photos as much as you want. Get that Blurry Bokeh Background in Photoshop

Blurry Bokeh Background

Do you want that soft focus, buttery, blurry background for your photos? Well, you don’t need an expensive lens to get it. I’ll show you how to get a blurry bokeh background in Photoshop. We’re going to start off with this image here. There’s already a little bit of blurring in the background, but we’re going to add some more duplicate my background layer and I want to make a cut out of the subject.

I want to subject on a layer with a layer mask. So I’m going to click up here where my quick selection tool is and I’m going to use, select subject to get my initial selection and when I use my quick selection tool to fix this area right here. The selection wasn’t quite complete. And now I’m going to click on so that can mask. I’m going to change my opacity just to look at this a little bit.

And since we’re going to use the same background, I just want to do some minor adjustments. I’m not going to worry too much about the hair, but I am going to add some smoothing and a little bit of feathering and some contrast. And there’s just a couple of areas that I might want to use my refine edge tool.

I see a little area right here and down here by this, shoe and right there, fix that, a couple of little areas over here. And that’s about all we’re going to do. I’m going to output this to a layer mask and say, okay. I think I’ll go pretty much with this selection. I say, we don’t have to do too much with the hair because we’re going to use this same background.

So our subject is cut out. Click on the Layer Mask and click on command, and there’s our selection. And if I need to refine the hair and parts of the rest of the body, I will do the global adjustments like you saw me do for smoothing and contrast. And then I would go back in and for instance, I’ll click on the Layer Mask thumbnail and come up here to select and mask.

And now I would make any kind of refinements to the hair, whether I wanted to use the refine edge brush or just click on refine hair, and then I would output it back to my layer mask. I’m going to make a copy of the background layer. I’m going to turn off visibility to the subject layer. Call this subject.

So with this background layer copy, going to highlight that and come up here to filter neural filters. And I’m going to select depth blur. I’m not going to use the depth blur filter to make any blur to my image. I’m not going to change any of these settings. All I need to do is click right here. It says Output Depth Map only click on that and then I’m going to output to a new layer and say, okay. So this depth map defines how much each blur should be applied to each pixel in the image.

The darker areas are the areas that will not have the blur. The lighter areas will be the areas that are blurred in the image. I’m going to name this layer depth map. I want to copy the contents of this layer because we’re going to use it later. So we’re going to copy this depth map and create a new channel from it. With a depth map layer

selected, I’m going to say command +A. I can come up to edit copy and I’m going to go to my channels and I’m going to come down here to the create new channel icon. Click on that and I’m going to say edit paste. So now we have an alpha channel that contains our depth map. I’ll turn back on my RGB and go back into my layers panel.

Say Command + D to deselect. I’m going to turn off my depth map layer and rename my background copy to Blur Gallery. I’m going to click on the mask of my subject and hold down the command key and click. So I made a selection. I wanted to expand that selection a little bit, so I’m going to come up here to select, modify, expand, say 15 pixels and say, okay.

And then with my blur gallery layer selected, I’m going to come up to edit content, aware fill. So you see in the preview window it looks okay, but we’re not going to worry too much about the way it looks right now because we are going to blur that background. You don’t need to change any settings here. Say, okay, I’m going to turn my subject layer back on.

I’m going to hit command + D to remove the selection and I’m going to make a smart object of the Blur Gallery layer. Next, I’m going up to Filter Blur Gallery, Field Blur. I’m going to increase the blur quite a bit around 50. On some images you might want to increase the light bokeh you see in the background how that affects the lighter areas.

I want to keep these the way they are for this image. And up at the top I’m going to say, okay. If we click on this arrow over here on the right Blur gallery, it reveals our Blur Gallery Smart filter. This is where we are going to utilize our depth map. This layer up here that we created. We’re going to go to the channels panel.

We’re going to click on the Alpha one channel or the Depth Map Channel. I’m going to hit Command A to select Command C to copy. I’m going to click on my RGB up here at the top, go back into my layers panel. Now we’re going to use the Alpha Channel copy on the field blur mask to control the application of this Blur gallery.

So on the smart filter mask let me hit alt or option and click. And now I’m and hit command+ V to paste the depth map on the smart filter mask this command +V. I’m going to click alt or option to go back to the image. And I’m in hit command + D to de-select. Now you can control things with our depth map that we applied to our smart filter.

So for instance, if I have a area right here where it should be blurred a little bit more, I can have a brush with a low flow and a color on white, and I can just paint that blur back in fixing this area right here. Get a little area that has some hallowing right here and that’s fixed a little bit of hallowing down here.

So you have control to be able to fix areas and same thing so you can get rid of all these small areas where there’s a little bit of hallowing. This is pretty good, not too much. And then if you want to move blur areas like say back here on this big pot back here. If I changed my brush to paint with black and I’m on that layer, it’s going to remove that blur just a little bit because I’m on a little flow.

So you can see that it’s closer and we could remove that blur if that was really a problem with an object that was closer. So you have control. That’s one reason you would use this method. Since we use a depth map, you see the down here by her feet, if you had a lens on your camera that gave you that shallow depth of field.

It is a gradual depth of field change with this method, all because of the depth blur map. So as we said, the darker areas do not have the blur. And you can see here that it is a gradual change in light. The lighter areas have the most blur, so that’s using the depth map and blur gallery in this method. You can also add blurriness to the lighter areas in this image with the Blur gallery smart filter selected, come up to image adjustments and levels.

By moving these sliders you can change the blurriness like for instance, I’m moving this middle slider and look at the trees above our head. This is the mid tone areas. Changing the sliders will create more blur by brightening or darkening a depth map. So far here is the before and here is the after.

And to add a little extra to this, I added a light ray layer. Here it is right here. I turn that on. That’s what it looks like. I have it on soft light and I put the opacity around 50%. Then I added a color look up at the very top and the color look up is this FUJI

F 125 Kodak 2393. I added that. Also put that on soft light and opacity about 60. So here’s my final output. Here’s the before and there’s the after. For more Photoshop tutorials, click on one of the videos on the screen now. Please like share and subscribe. Remember it’s never too late to learn. Thanks for watching.

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