Enhance Your Photos With Blur

Considering the kind of things you can pull off in post image processing these days, clicking a good picture is just the beginning. We have already had tutorials that show you how to click better pictures, and even some basic post processing tips to have some fun with them later. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to blur them.

By blur, I’m not talking about the lack of sharpness caused by jittery hands; that’s just ghastly! What I’ll show you here are some basic tricks you can pull off on your photos with the help of selective blurring. When applied right, selective blur can add a whole new dimension to your composition. Check out the following 3 simple examples we’ve used to fix or enhance some commonly taken pictures. All you need is Adobe Photoshop and an open mind.

Background blurring
The one thing that can destroy any good portrait shot is a distracting background. Even when the background isn’t particularly messy, its sometimes just the colors or any other element of the background that will take the viewer’s attention away from the main subject. That’s where blurring can help.

Though this effect can be easily attained while shooting the photo itself, you’ll be surprised with the kind of control Photoshop can give you for this process. Take the image below for example. Though the background is not particularly disturbing, the bright colors and the long focus distance makes the overall image look a bit flat. Using a bit of Gaussian blur, we can shift the focus directly to the man in the picture. Here’s how.

Stock image sourced from www.sxc.hu

Open the image in Adobe Photoshop (We used Photoshop CS2 for this tutorial). and select the Polygonal Lasso tool from the side toolbar.

Select the background area of the image (in our case the right side). If you make a mistake while selecting, you can always backtrack using the Backspace key. To add more area to the selection simply hold down the Shift key and continue clicking.

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Once the area is selected, go to “Filter | Blur | Gaussian Blur” from the menu bar.

In the Gaussian Blur window, adjust the Radius slider till your background is blurred enough. I selected the Radius as 10.1 pixels.

If your subject has any sharp edges at the part that touches the background, you can smoothen it using the Blur tool.

The image below is what the end result looked like. No more distracting backgrounds!

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Add speed to your image
All commercial cameras have a “Sports” mode for clicking subjects in fast motion. Due to the extremely high shutter speeds used in these modes, you capture the subject in a crisp, clear frame with all the motion in the moment left as a standstill. Though this works great in most situations, instances like the image of the running horse below look a little, well regular.

_Stock image sourced from www.sxc.hu _

With a little motion blur, you can breathe new life into images like these. It’s really simple, here’s how—

Open the image in Photoshop and in the History window (to the left), click on the little square to the left of “Open” as shown in the image above. You will be marking that as the source for your history brush, which you will use in a bit.

Now go to “Filter | Blur | Motion Blur”.

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In the Motion Blur pop-up window, select the amount of blur distance that you see fit. In this case I selected 30 pixels. Make sure to adjust the angle of the motion blur to suit the direction of the subject in your image.

Now that your image has a good blur to it, select the History brush from the left toolbar, as shown below.

With the History brush, start ‘painting’ over the main subject, to get the blur effect off it. As you can probably notice, we didn’t apply the History brush on the whole horse, instead we kept some parts like the back section of the horse and the hind legs in motion for a more natural effect.

And, with a little cropping we have this as our final image.

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Cool zoom blur
Though not an, essential the zoom blur effect is commonly used these days to bring complete attention to the subject of the picture. While in most cases the effect looks pretty trippy, it does work well in shots where the subject is running/moving towards the camera. It’s a pretty easy effect to master too.

We take a simple image of this little girl playing in the park, and open it in Photoshop.

Stock image sourced from www.sxc.hu

As in the Motion blur tutorial, you click on the little square to the left of “Open” in the History window, to mark the source for your history brush.

Now go to “Filter | Blur |Radial Blur”.

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In the Radial Blur window, select the Blur Method as Zoom, and change the Quality to Best. You can select the appropriate number as the amount of blur; here I went with 10.

Like I said earlier, the result is pretty trippy.

Now as we did in the previous example, we use the history brush to clean out the Blur from over the kid in the picture. In Zoom blur, its recommended to clean the blur off your whole image. Advance users can add selective motion blur later, for a trailing effect.

That’s it, your image should now have a whole new feel.