Simple Out of Focus Background Technique

Thanks to Photoshop and other image processing applications, we can improve our photographs in ways that are not always possible when we’re doing the actual job of shooting photos on location. Here’s a particular example I wanted to share that is easy to apply to similar images.

During a recent wedding reception, I made a number of photos of the bride and groom before they started eating their meal. In making my first few shots, I didn’t really notice the distracting background painting of the French nobleman that looks annoyed by the couple. Yet, at the same time, this painting does add to the ambiance of the reception.

So how do we fix the problem? Well, we could simply crop the painting out of the photo. Like this:

But if want to keep the painting in the background, it’s pretty simple to just blur it out in Photoshop. Here’s how:

1. Open the image in Photoshop, and duplicate the background layer.

2. Go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur. Blur the image, paying particular notice of course to the background. Don’t worry about the foreground of the image, you will fix that in the next step six.

3. Now, at the bottom of the layer’s palette, click the Layer Mask button (the third one from the left of the palette that has a square and circle in the middle).

4. Now make sure the foreground color in the Tool’s palette is black.

5. Select the Brush tool in the Tool’s palette. It should be a hard brush about medium size. Make sure the layer mask is selected in the layer’s palette.

6. Use the brush tool to “paint” back in the areas in the foreground of the image that you don’t want blurred out.

In the before and after, we can clearly see that blurring the background helps keep the focus on the couple and not the distracting French guy in the painting.

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