Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Creating Depth of Field using Adobe Photoshop Elements 9.0

Selecting the background and blurring it can just pop up your subject but does not give a sense of depth of field.

Following is the tutorial for bringing depth of field to your photos. It uses PSE 9 layer masks and gradient tool.

Original Photo

Final edited photo with Depth of field

















Here are the steps to add DOF to any photo :

1. Open an image in PSE Editor.




 2. Press Control+J to create the copy of the background layer.

 3. Keeping the copy of the layer selected in the layers palette, go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur to blur the layer such that the image looks blur to an extent of the maximum blurriness you would expect in your final photo.

















4.   Now go to Layer>Layer mask>Reveal all. Also make sure that your color swatch in left tool bar has default colors selected as Black and white.


5. Now select the Gradient tool from left tool bar.





6. Stroke the gradient tool in the direction where you want to represent the depth of field. So in the image used in example depth of field goes from the point where the front cub is standing to the direction where second cub is sitting behind. So I moved the Gradient tool across the red path marked below.

















7. Here is how my output looks after applying the gradient and my sharp background is blurred in proportion to the distance from the front subject.





8 comments:

  1. I love your site and am now following it.
    I’m looking forward to future posts from you - I know I'll learn lots. I have PSE 6 - will most of what you teach apply?
    Regards, Mari
    http://www.mariscamera.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks Mari.

    PSE 6 is good. However you would be missing on many new cool features like Guided edits, layer masks, cool fun edits and many good features in Organizer as well like back/sync through photoshop.com, inpiration browser for good tutorials, good facebook integration and many more.

    I would recommend you to download trial version of PSE 9 and just have a look at the new features. I am sure you would love them.

    You may also send me your requests for any particular tutorial. I would be glad to write on that.

    Hoping that my blog would help you a bit.

    Best Regards,
    Vaishali

    ReplyDelete
  3. This did not work for me it just makes the whole image blurred! What did I do wrong?? Please help x

    ReplyDelete
  4. So much helpful tutorial. I have learned a lot from your tutorial. Thanks for sharing.
    We are providing Clipping Path

    ReplyDelete
  5. Wonderful Tutorial, thanks for putting this together! This is obviously one great post. Thanks for the valuable information.

    ReplyDelete