How to Blur a Photos Background in Adobe Photoshop CC (Tutorial)

 

INTRODUCTION 

in this video i'm going to show you how to blur the background of your photos in adobe photoshop so the first thing i'm going to do is duplicate our original layer so in the layers panel i can right click duplicate layer you can also use the shortcut command j now on the top layer i want to select out our subject of our photo so in photoshop you can go over to the object selection tool 

USEFUL BUTTON

which is a new one and there's actually this really useful button that's just select subject this will automatically try to detect the subject of your photo and select it now it's not perfect and you can do some manual lasso adjustments and you can make sure you're working on add or subtract to selection mode so in this case there's a part of the boot here that i can try to add to the selection i can go to subtract from selection and there's a part of this stairwell that i don't want and you can kind of manually refine things in that way you see you have all these different tools available for you to select in photoshop but now 

 LAYER MASK 

what we want to do is create a layer mask so i'll go to layer layer mask and we'll choose reveal selection so what we've done now is we have this top layer and the top layer just has our selection and then we have the original photo on the background so we have this cool sort of separation that we've created and this is actually the foundation for a lot of cool effects that you can do in photoshop for example if you ever wanted to put text behind a person you basically have separated these two layers 

RADIUS OF THE SHAPE 

so you can sandwich any sort of effects between them but if we want to just blur the background all we're going to do on this background layer is go to filter blur and there's a couple different blurs you can do there's also the blur gallery now if you're working with blurs like gaussian blur it's pretty simple you can just increase the strength it doesn't look as realistic as like something out of a camera would but it can be really good for youtube thumbnails or just creating this contrast and pop of depth that you might need for a thumbnail or other sort of designs a more realistic one if is if you go to filter blur lens blur this one will allow you to create more of like a realistic blur that comes out of a camera lens and in the right hand menu you have some options such as the blur focal distance the radius of the shape 

TRADITIONAL GAUSSIAN BLUR 

so you can choose things like a square or triangle and you can see rather than just like our traditional gaussian blur this one is taking those highlights and it's we're kind of getting those bokeh blurs and those highlights and you can even adjust the specular highlights and the threshold and the brightness of them so we're getting a little bit of a more realistic look now when i press ok you'll see that we still have our original cutout on top and so we've brought that back into focus and we get this realistic blur in the background which is a little bit more cool obviously it doesn't look as realistic as from a camera because you know this isn't how depth field would work in real life but it can still create a cool pop of contrast for you 

ORIGINAL SUBJECT

now you do get this sort of haloing effect because you know the original subject is getting blurred too and in cases like this you can maybe try to even blur this layer mask so maybe if i add a blur onto that layer mask it can help with some of that haloing i can even maybe go in there with a brush tool on white and just try to softly brush away some of those edges another idea you can try so that you can avoid this haloing effect is before you blur your background layer 

ORIGINAL EDGE 

i'm actually just going to grab my regular lasso tool i'm going to try to create a generally even outline around our subject and then this time i'm just going to right click and fill with content aware fill this should give us a decent fill try to make the out remove the object from the image we don't have to worry too much if the middle looks kind of crazy we're actually just trying to get rid of some of those edges that that are going to halo later and then when we do have our other layer back in the front of it we can then blur the background layer now so if i do the lens blur like before now it'll blur it without catching the original edge it looks a little bit more blended in and we get a more crisp edge that doesn't have that halo 

SMART FILTERS

so this is another tip that you can work in remember you still want to pay attention to the selection make sure things are good but that's one idea to work around if you want a full tutorial on how to remove objects from your photo and more in depth i do have a separate tutorial all just on that content-aware fill and other manual tools that you can touch up removing objects with also as a final tip if you're doing for most blurs the lens blur doesn't work this way but if you right click and convert it to a smart object now whenever you do apply an effect on it so if i did you'll see the lens blur is grayed out but if i apply any other blur then i am working on a smart layer i can always double click back on those filters those smart filters and i can adjust them again 

CONCLUSION 

so it's a little less permanent less destructive and that can always hide and bring things back so work on smart layers if you aren't doing the lens blur or just always keep a backup of your original photo on a layer underneath so you can always reference it and go back to it but this is a cool and basic way to blur the backgrounds of your images in photoshop if you enjoyed this tutorial you can check out hundreds of more photoshop tutorials in the playlist on my channel my name is justin odisho you can subscribe to stay tuned for new videos thank you so much for watching and i'll see you in the next one

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