Tutorial

Selective Focus

By Fred Yake

Many times we wish to highlight a subject by allowing the background to fall out of focus, setting the subject apart

from a busy background.

The background can be recognizable as to general location, etc. but be soft enough to add depth.

Ideally it is best to accomplish this with the camera. Shoot the subject with a wide aperture to minimize depth of

field. Even better, use a longer lens. Use a telephoto lens and increase the distance between you and the subject.

       The longer the lens the more dramatic the selective focus results. As usual timing never seems to be on your side. Many times you see a terrific candid portrait or bird just posing for you 6 feet away. No time for special settings or changing lenses. Just shoot and worry about all the artsy stuff later.

       Now you can add that focus depth in Photoshop CS. In the filter menu click  Blur > and a new CS addition in the popup window comes up, called lens blur. Lens blur has a very natural look and is very controllable. In order to use this feature you need to carefully select the main subject. This may take a little time and work but can look very nice in the finished image.

Make a rough selection with the lasso tool, then click on the mask, round circle in the small square box at the bottom of the tool box and then the paint brush. Make sure the color boxes near the bottom of the tool box are set to the default black and white.

Set the brush opacity to 100% in the options bar. You can

quickly change the paint brush size while working. By using

the bracket keys, left or right, to make the brush larger or smaller.

With the black selected; the brush will paint a red selection around the subject.

Simply trace carefully around the edge. You can make the edge of the brush

harder or softer by using the bracket keys while holding the shift key.

If you make a mistake simply hit the X key to switch the brush to subtract or erase the red. When painting the mask is complete, click the box next to the mask to return to the selection. In some cases you may find it easier to select only

the subject using the samemethod. When the selection is complete then simply select > inverse to select only the background. Depending on the subject you may wish to feather the selection from 1 - 2 pixels.

With the background now selected go to filter lens blur and use a setting which you feel works best for the image and

click ok. You should now have a natural looking out of focus background.