Photoshop Tutorials: Easy Depth Of Field Effect

Step 7: Apply The "Lens Blur" Filter

Now that we're back in the Layers palette, make sure you have "Layer 1" selected (the currently selected layer is highlighted in blue). We're going to create our depth of field effect at this point, and we're going to do it using Photoshop's Lens Blur filter. Go up to the Filter menu at the top of the screen, choose Blur, and then choose Lens Blur:

This brings up the Lens Blur dialog box, which consists of a large preview area on the left and a bunch of potentially confusing options along the right. You can safely ignore every option except for two of them - the Depth Map option that we just talked about a moment ago and the Radius option. For the Depth Map, make sure that Alpha 1 is selected so Photoshop uses the selection we made to determine how to blur the image. Of course, as we just pointed out, we need to tell Photoshop to invert our depth map so that the area we selected is the area that remains in focus. In my case, this means the woman's face will remain in focus while everything else becomes blurred. To do that, simply click inside the checkbox to the left of the word Invert.

The Radius option works exactly the same here as it does in the Gaussian Blur filter. Simply drag the Radius slider to the right to increase the amount of blurring that's applied to the image. Keep an eye on the preview area on the left as you drag the slider so you can see what's happening. Adjust the Radius slider until you achieve the amount of blur you're looking for. Here, I've set my Radius value to 20. Again, the value you choose for your image may be different:

Click OK in the top right corner of the dialog box when you're done to exit out of it. Here's my image now with the blurring applied. Only the woman's face remains in focus:

If, after applying the blur effect, you feel it's a bit too strong, you can fine-tune it simply by lowering the opacity of "Layer 1". You'll find the Opacity option in the top right corner of the Layers palette. I'm going to lower mine to around 85%:

Here's my image after lowering the opacity. The change is subtle, but you can make out the man's facial features a little better now:

At this point, the only thing I don't like is that there's some blur being applied to the left side of the woman's face (her right, our left) and it's causing her face to blend in with the man's face behind her. I'd like to touch that up so that her face appears nice and sharp along the edge. I can do that easily using a layer mask, and I'll do that next!