Tutorial – Artificial Selective Focus

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A lot of awesome photography features selective focus, where only a certain part of an image is in focus, the rest blurred. This effect isn’t hard to re-create in photoshop, and this is a simple yet effective method in doing so. Remember to click each thumbnail for a larger preview.

Step One
The first and most obvious step is to chose & prepare your image. You can apply this technique almost anywhere you like, layouts, banners, simple photos of your own, anywhere. I chose this image of Bonnie Wright as Ginny Weasley & applied some colour filters.

Step Two
Once your happy with the basics of your image, its time to start blurring. Duplicate your base layer, and in Photoshop go Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Set the radius to 1.3. Press ok.

Step Three
Now we don’t want the whole image blurred, so we’ve got to take some away. With your eraser (around, say, 400px master diameter and 0% hardness), erase the blurred layer to reveal the parts of the image you want sharp or “in focus”. For my image, I erased a bit like this. Remember to make sure there is a nice gradient/blend between blurred & not blurred parts of the image.

Step Four
Personally, I the difference between blurred & not blurred isn’t defined enough for me, so I’m going to blur a little more. Duplicate your already blurred layer, and repeat the blurring process, only change the radius to 3.0.

Step Five
… and again, we have to erase & blend. Erase from the same area as before (i.e. around the face), only erase more out so that we can still see the 1.3 blurred layer. This achieves a gradual blur kind of look.

Step Six
It still isn’t blurred enough, so I’m going again. Duplicating the 3.0 blurred layer, I blurred it the same way again, only with a 6.0 radius.

Step Seven
And yes, erase again. There should now be 4 different layers in the image; the in-focus one, and then 3 layers of progressive blur-ness. These are my PS layers, which also show how I’ve erased them so that the more blurred the layers become, the less we see of them.

You’re pretty much done at this point. Remember to keep in mind the image your working with, for instance with the ‘variation’ below, some parts of her body are in front of her face, so they get blurred a little too. The best way to think of it is if you find the face/part you want in focus, and just blur everything other than that. Its for those reasons why we layer the blur-ness, because some parts will be closer to the focused part than others.

Variation – Click for larger

Remember that these steps are only a guideline and you can change them however you wish. And if you want, e-mail me what you’ve made with this tutorial, I’d love to see your results!