From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Creative blurring effects - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Creative blurring effects

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- [Instructor] Photoshop has several different blur filters, both under the Blur Gallery as well as the Blur menu. To create a simple uniform blur in an image, the Gaussian blur works really well, as do many of the other blurs, but for the most part, the filters listed underneath the Blur Gallery have more options and offer additional controls for selective blur effects, and they actually change the amount of blur over the length of the blur. Now, before adding a blur, I'm going to convert the background into a smart object and then choose filter, Blur Gallery and will start with the field blur. The default blur for field blur is a simple one pin blur. We can reposition this pin by dragging it, but it's going to stay the same because there's only one blur pin. I can increase the amount of blur or decrease the amount of blur, but the key here is to have more than one blur point. As soon as I click again, I can then either remove the blur in an area or click again and add more blur to an area. This actually changes the amount of blur over the length of the blur, so it's not like just lowering the opacity of the blur like you can do with a mask in Gaussian Blur. These multiple pins will create a single unified mask and I can reposition them at any time. If I hold down the M key, we can actually see that mask and see that it dynamically will create a new mask based on the location of the pin. For all of these blurs, we can hold down the H key if we want to hide the interface and we can tap the P key if we want to see a preview of before and after. Alright, for right now, I'm going to delete all three of these pins. I'll just select them, and when they've got the blue dot in the middle, that means they are the targeted pin and we can tap the delete key. Let's move to the iris blur. So the iris blur can create a circular blur. We've got a thin blue line and I can drag that out in order to increase the size of the circle. We can click on the square icon in order to create a more square blur. We can also click on any of the small white anchor points in order to distort the circle to an ellipse. And let's add a little bit more blur here to make sure we can see what we're doing. These small dots set the fade range, so nothing between the small dot and the center will be blurred. It's only between the dot and the outer edge that's going to be blurred. So I can click and drag these and they'll all move by default in tandem, but I can hold down the option key on the Mac or the alt key on Windows and just move one at a time in order to achieve an effect like this. All right, I'm going to tap delete in order to delete that pin, and we'll move to the tilt shift option. Here we have that same pin where we can dial in the amount of blur, but the fade range is going to be between the solid white line and the dotted white line. I can reposition any of those lines. I'll use command Z to undo that. If I hold down the option key, then they will move in tandem. I can also use these small white dots in order to rotate the angle of the blur. Let's say I just want these people in focus. I can reposition the blur pin and to narrow the depth of field, we can move the solid white lines, and then I'll increase the fade range by holding down the option key and dragging out. You can also click and drag in order to rotate anywhere between the solid and the dotted line, but just be a little bit careful because if you click, instead of clicking and dragging, it's going to set down another pin. All right, I'll tap the delete key in order to remove that. And there's another option here for tilt shift. I can add symmetric distortion. I'll need to select the pin and then choose that option. And we can choose what direction we want the distortion to go in. If I only want the distortion in the foreground or in the lower area here, I can uncheck that and then it's only going to distort that area. Now for all of these filters, you'll want to add some noise after applying the blur, otherwise you'll see an area that is not blurred, that may have noise or grain in it, and then it's going to transition to a very smooth area. Typically, I will reduce the fade range and then zoom into a 100% using command 1 on Mac or control 1 on Windows, and then use the noise option, set to grain and increase the amount, size, and roughness. So the amount is the amount of noise, the size will increase or decrease the size of the noise. And the roughness makes a very blotchy looking noise on the right and a very kind of almost reticulated looking noise if we move it to the left. You can also add in color noise. I'm going to leave that off and you can decrease the amount of noise in the highlight area. So in an image like this, I probably only need an amount of about 5 or 10. I would decrease the size here and I'm going to increase the roughness, but of course that'll depend on your source photo. You just want to make sure that the noise that you're seeing in the blurred area matches the noise in the original image. Alright, I'll zoom out using command zero and then I'll increase that fade range again. Alright, let's go ahead and apply that. And then I'm going to move to this umbrella image. I want to add a blur to the background. So I'll right click and choose to convert to smart object and then return to filter and then Blur Gallery. And this time we'll continue on with the path blur. So the path blur automatically sets a path in the image area with two endpoints. Now I'm going to click on that blue dot and go ahead and lengthen that endpoint. If I want to move this path, I can hold down the command key on Mac or control key on Windows and reposition it in the image. So let's go ahead and zoom in and look at the blur that we're adding to the water. So I can change the speed of the blur by using the speed slider here. I can also taper the blur if needed. The blur by default is centered and that's going to give us a more organic looking blur, but we can go ahead and toggle that off as well. But you'll notice now on the edges, they're not as blurred as the center. Alright, if I want to change the direction of the blur, I can click on any point. If I click on the point in the center, it will add a point and I can distort the blur. If I want to remove a pin at any time, I can tap the delete key while it's got that blue dot highlighted and we can add as many of these blue dots as we want to change this shape of the blur. We can also edit the end points of the blur. I can increase it so that my blur gets bigger at this side, and I can also change their speed independently. All right, I'm going to select the path and tap delete to delete all of these pins and then tap delete again to remove it. If you want to create your own path, we can click once to set the path down and then click again. And then to end the path, we need to click once more. I'm going to decrease the speed a little, and then under noise I'll add somewhere around 10% of the amount and leave the size, roughness and color set. Alright, let's apply that filter and then I'm going to select the umbrella layer, right click and convert this to a smart object. I'll return to filter, and this time, because it's listed at the top, I'll hold down the option key on Mac or the alt key on Windows. And what that'll do is it'll bring up the filter with the last used settings. This can be convenient if you want to carry over the noise from one layer to another, but I don't want the path blur, so I'm going to uncheck that. And then we'll take a look at the spin blur. Again, we have the blur angle that we can dial up or down, and we have a circle with a pin, so we could also increase or decrease the blur here. I'm going to zoom out because I want to make this much larger. I'm going to click on the blue outline in order to increase the size of the circle. When we click on this dot, it'll increase the width and the height. If we want to distort it, I can click on one of the smaller dots because I want to make this more of an ellipse. So I'll click and drag up here as well. Let's take off some of that blur. It's a little bit too much. And then I'm going to reposition it. With the spin blur, everything that's inside of these outer dots will be blurred. So if I bring these in, we can see that it will stop spinning more quickly, and if I bring them out, it will blur all the way to this distance. Now obviously this doesn't look right because it doesn't look like the umbrella is spinning, and that's because the center point isn't at the top of the umbrella, but when I click and drag the pin, it moves the entire spin blur. So instead, I'll hold down the option key on Mac or the alt key on Windows, and that enables me to reposition the point with which the blur is spinning around. So I'm just going to move that up to the top of the umbrella and I will decrease the blur angle, so it'll be a little bit less of a blur. Then the noise is already set. But I do want to show you the motion effects so we can add a strobe effect. I'm going to increase the strobe strength, and then I'll change the strobe flashes down to 2. So this would emulate a flash going off during a long exposure and freezing the motion. For now, I'll go ahead and turn that off. We don't need a strobe effect here, and then we can apply the spin blur, but we do have a little problem at the bottom of the blur, and that is we don't see the handle for the umbrella. So I'm going to tap the "b" key to select the brush tool, go to my smart filter mask, and then make sure that I'm painting with black in that mask and paint the handle back in so that it's no longer blurred. So as you can see, Photoshop's Blur Gallery is an excellent way to add creative blur effects to your images.

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