There’s quite a few ways of creating this effect in Photoshop but I discovered this is method the other day. To me this looks best on landscape and architectural photography because of the ‘miniature’ feel it gives an image but it’s become quite a ‘trendy’ effect in portraiture recently so I thought it would make a good tutorial.
Open your image. I’ve used an image I shot on the Amalfi Coast as an example.
[click image to view larger]
Click on the channels tab in your layers palette and create a new alpha channel by clicking on the icon that looks like a document (next to the trash icon). With your default foreground and background colours selected draw a straight gradient on the alpha channel. You can go from top to bottom or left to right depending on the effect you are after…I guess you could use a circular gradient as well although I haven’t tried that. Name the new channel ‘depth map’.
Go back to your layers palette, duplicate your background layer and open the Lens Blur filter.
In the ‘Depth Map’ pull down menu choose the new alpha channel you’ve created.
Click on the area within your image that you want to be your point of focus. By using a depth map the filter is able to blur with varying degrees of strength around the point of focus you have selected.
You can see here that the blur gets progressively stronger as it gets further away from the point I have selected to stay in focus.
Enjoy!
Guidelines