Photoshop Effects: Creative Focus with Lens Blur
Photoshop Effects and Photo Effects at Photoshop Essentials.com
Written By Steve Patterson
In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we're going learn how to add creative focus to an image using Photoshop's Lens Blur filter, which has been available in Photoshop since Photoshop CS (which means you'll need Photoshop CS, CS2 or CS3 for this tutorial). When most people think of adding a blurring effect to an image in Photoshop, they immediately think of the Gaussian Blur filter, which has been around in Photoshop since the days of the dinosaurs (they used Photoshop BC back then). While Gaussian Blur is still a great filter with plenty of uses, it doesn't offer us much in terms of control over the blurring effect and usually needs to be paired up with a layer mask for it to be of any real use. Photoshop's Lens Blur filter, on the other hand, offers an incredible amount of control over the effect (more than you'll most likely ever need), and when used with an easy-to-create Depth Map, as we'll see in this tutorial, we can specify exactly how much blurring to apply to different areas of the image, giving us complete creative control over which areas are in focus and which are not.
We're not going to be covering every single option of the Lens Blur filter in this tutorial, since a) that would be boring, and b) there's really only a couple of options you need to know about to get great results with it, and those are the ones we'll look at here. This is a great filter to use with all kinds of photos, including wedding photography, landscape photos, and really any photo where you want to bring attention to a certain part or parts of the image by adjusting the focus.
Here's the image I'll be using for this Photoshop tutorial:
I want to bring more attention to the woman's face, especially her eyes, so I'm going to be using the Lens Blur filter to bring only those areas into focus, blurring out the rest of the image:
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The blurring effect we're going for here is fairly subtle, but once you're comfortable with the basics of the Lens Blur filter, you'll find yourself coming up with all sorts of wild and imaginative uses for it. Let's get started.
Step 1: Duplicate The Background Layer
With our image open in Photoshop, the first thing we need to do for this effect is duplicate our Background layer, which is the only layer we currently have in our Layers palette and contains our original image:
We need to make a copy of this layer so that we avoid doing anything to our original image information. To make a copy of the layer, use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac). Photoshop duplicates the layer for us, places the copy above the original Background layer in the Layers palette, and names the copy "Layer 1":
Step 2: Add A New Channel
At the beginning of this tutorial, I mentioned that we can use something called a Depth Map with the Lens Blur filter to specify how much blurring to apply to different areas of the image, and we're going to begin creating our Depth Map right now. The term "Depth Map" is really nothing more than a cool name for what is essentially just a selection in Photoshop, and to create one, we first need to add a new channel, so switch over to your Channels palette which you'll find by default grouped in beside the Layers palette:
In the Channels palette, you'll see what looks like four layers, except that these are channels, not layers, and there's really only three of them. The one at the top, named "RGB", is just the composite of the three color channels below it, named "Red", "Green", and "Blue". The Red, Green and Blue channels combine to create all the colors we see in our image, and that's already more than we need to know for this tutorial, but if you want to learn more about them, be sure to check out our RGB and Color Channels Explained tutorial.
We need to add a new channel, so click on the New Channel icon at the bottom of the Channels palette (it's the icon directly to the left of the trash bin icon):
Photoshop adds a new channel for us below the other channels and names it "Alpha 1":
As soon as you add the new channel, you'll see your image turn completely black, and that's because what we're now looking at is the new channel, not the image, and the channel is currently filled with black. What we've just added here is called an alpha channel, as opposed to the color channels above it, which is why Photoshop named it "alpha 1". If alpha channels are new to you, don't worry about them. We'll cover alpha channels fully in another tutorial, but for now, alpha channels are just selections, the same as if you were creating a selection with the Rectangular Marquee Tool or the Lasso Tool. This is just a fancier way of making a selection, but it's still just a selection. In fact, if you were to drag out a selection with, say, the Lasso Tool and then save your selection, it would be saved as an alpha channel. We're going to be using this alpha channel to tell Photoshop where we want the blurring effect to be applied at full strength, where we want it to be applied at less than full strength, and where we don't want any blurring to be applied at all, and we're going to do that by painting on our alpha channel with white using the Brush Tool, as we'll do next.
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