This can be used to create shallow depth-of-field effects. You can also use a mask channel to define the areas where you wish to selectively apply the Lens Blur. With such an overwhelming interface, the main controls to concentrate on in the Lens Blur filter dialog are the Radius slider, which controls the amount of blur applied to the image, and the Specular Highlights slider, which controls how much the highlights blow out.

The image examples I have included here show the range of photographic blurring effects that can be achieved working either directly on the image background layer, or by isolating the background contents and blurring these separately, such as in Better still, all the Blur Gallery filters can make use of the computer’s Graphics Processor Unit (GPU) to significantly speed up the calculations (assuming the video card in your computer is compatible, of course) so much so that you’ll often find there is very little, if any, delay as you adjust the sliders. Some of the Blur Gallery filters go beyond what can be achieved using the original Lens Blur filter. With this suite of filter effects and additional control panels, it is possible to simulate lens blur effects, but with much simpler sliders to control the blur amount and bokeh (the lens flaring effect). More recently, Adobe added the Blur Gallery effects to Photoshop. Plus, the sheer number of sliders can also be considered quite intimidating at first glance. First, it can be quite slow to work with, and therefore, it can be a painstaking experience to tweak the sliders in search of an optimum blur setting. Working with the Lens Blur filter you can create fairly realistic-looking lens blur effects, but the filter suffers from certain limitations.

The way this filter works is to temporarily convert the image to a 32-bit, pseudo-HDR editing space, before it applies the blur effect in which the highlight areas can be made to flare out first, and the shape of the iris blur is governed by how you adjust the settings in the Iris section. The Lens Blur filter offers the best potential to simulate the way a camera lens forms an optical image and then throws this out of focus. What is also particularly noticeable is the way in which bright highlights tend to blow out as they go out of focus and how you can see the shape of the camera lens iris in the blurred highlight points. When the radius of these points is very small, the image is considered sharp and when the radius is large, the image appears to be out of focus.

Consider for a moment how a camera lens focuses a viewed object to form an image that is made up of circular points on the film/sensor surface. For instance, while the Gaussian Blur filter is useful for many things, such as softening masks or smoothing detail, it is unable to mimic making an image appear to be out of focus. However, if you want to make a photograph appear realistically out of focus, it is not just a matter of simply blurring the detail. Various Photoshop filters allow you to do this at the post-processing stage, though how well you can match a true de-focused lens look still depends on which method you use to apply a blur effect.įor example, there are 16 different kinds of blur filters available in Photoshop. There are Photoshop techniques you can use that can be particularly useful when working with images shot using small-size sensors, or lenses that don’t have ultra-wide apertures, where the objective is to achieve, for instance, a shallow focus. Selective focusing, or the ability to restrict the lens focus, doesn’t always have to be done in camera. Creative and selective blur can easily be added to photos in post-production.

Blur overlay photoshop