Photography ideas, camera & image editing

We can defuse the background to draw attention to the subject. We can simulate the defocused Depth-of-field digitally. This tutorial illustrates a simple process of doing this in Photoshop or GIMP. For this tutorial, I use a picture taken at a Expo in Nagoya, Japan.

 

In the above photo, the background is fairly sharp. We will like to defocus it to direct more attention to the 3 shark men in blue. 

Firstly, using the Polygonal Lasso, select the areas outside of the 3 shark men. I leave a small border gap between the subjects and the background.

 

 

Next, I select feather to soften the edges of the selection. See the picture directly below.

 

Next, I apply the Gaussian Blur. See the result below.

 

 

Now, we can see that the image is more impactful as attention is focussed more on the subject.

 

 

 

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