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Photoshop CC’s recent addition to its Blur Gallery, Path Blur offers a creative and flexible way to add directional motion to your images in post-production. It’s astonishing! You’ve got to try it to believe it – and to truly understand it.
The Blur Gallery now has five effects (Field Blur, Iris Blur, Tilt-Shift, Path Blur, and Spin Blur) that can be controlled from a single panel. Once you’ve accessed one, you can quickly access the others at the same time enabling you to create complex blur effects in a single stop. Path Blur alone is capable of delivering lots of complex motion effects with one simple path.
Before applying Path Blur, consider using a Smart Object to make the filter non-destructive, re-editable, and maskable. (I recommend you acquire Raw files as a Smart Objects but in cases where you can’t, such as cases that involve merges or stacks or major retouching, convert your Background layer to a Smart Object – Layer: Smart Objects: Convert To Smart Object.)
To apply the filter follow this path - Filter: Blur Gallery : Path Blur. The Blur Gallery panel will appear, offering you five extraordinary sliders and multiple points of control.
Photographers use blur (or bokeh) for a variety of reasons: to enhance space through depth of field; to add interesting visual artifacts; to simplify them; to change the quality of their expression. In the past, blur was controlled almost entirely through exposure; now it can also be controlled during post-processing, giving photographers an unprecedented array of options and ways to customize the look and feel of their images. Knowing what you can do, how far you can go, and when you can do it may change the way you shoot, one time, sometimes, or all the time.
There are many blur filters in Photoshop; Field Blur, Iris Blur, Tilt-Shift, Gaussian Blur, Lens Blur, Motion Blur, Radial Blur, Shape Blur, Smart Blur, Surface Blur, in order of appearance in the Filter: Blur drop-down menu. (See A Quick Visual Comparison Of Photoshop's Blur Filters here.) The choices are extensive and it pays to familiarize yourself with your options by experimenting with them; you’ll find you have an extraordinary set of options that you can modify and combine creatively. If you only use the filters Gaussian Blur and Lens Blur, you’ll still have game-changing control at your fingertips, once you learn how to extend and modify them.
Photoshop's Lens Blur filter
There are several important non-destructive strategies you can use to gain more control over all filter effects that will enable you to go further in your explorations and generate more sophisticated and compelling results. Try one or all of the moves in this classic progression. Apply a filter to a duplicate layer and then modify its Opacity, Blend Mode, Blend If Sliders, and add a layer mask.
Recently, I had a great conversation with Matt Payne (FStop & Collaborate).
We talked about …
In bonus content, we discuss studying creativity, ways to do it, and how it has helped me as an artist.
Before Blur FX
After Blur FX
There are many reasons to explore blur in your images: remove distractions, direct attention, enhance space, modify mood and add interesting visual artifacts are a few among many. Blur can be controlled at the point of capture and in post-processing. Thoroughly understanding your post-processing options will help you make choices about when and how to control blur in your images before, during and after exposure.
When it comes to post-processing blur, you’ve got options! Photoshop currently offers 14 filters: Field Blur, Iris Blur, Tilt-Shift, Average, Blur, Blur More, Box Blur, Gaussian Blur, Lens Blur, Motion Blur, Radial Blur, Shape Blur, Smart Blur, Surface Blur – in order of appearance in the Filter > Blur drop-down menu. (If you want to extend your software palette even further, explore onOne Software’s FocalPoint.)
At first glance, the list is overwhelming. Where do you start? Get started with this quick visual survey of available options.
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Indispensable, Photoshop’s High Pass filtration offers contrast and sharpening effects no other tool does.
(Read Curves, Clarity, Dehaze, High Pass, Texture and Sharpening Compared.)
With only one slider, High Pass filtration slip streams between sharpening or detail enhancement (at a low setting) and luminosity contrast adjustment (at a high setting). The two are intimately tied to one another; the difference is the granularity that the contrast is applied. At a low setting, High Pass filtration accentuates contrast along contours with a thin feathered line, while the flat gray areas surrounding contours on the high pass layer tend not to accentuate texture or noise. At a high setting High Pass filtration creates stronger contrast so broadly feathered that it creates a localized vignetting effect, accentuating the illusion of volume in the process.
(Read more here on How To Apply High Pass Filtration.)
The intensity of either or both of these High Pass effects can be accentuated by adding more contrast to the High Pass layer with Curves. Unlike raising the High Pass filter slider while you apply it, which increases the width of the lines on it, increasing the contrast of the layer with Curves does not; it simply makes the lines darker and the haloes brighter.
Take these steps ...
Using words can help you find new perspectives that can be translated into images. How? Tell a story, from at least three different points of view – it, I, and you.
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First, tell the story in the third person (it) as a distant observer – “Just the facts ma’am.”
What images are needed to tell your viewers a complete story about your subject?
This perspective tends to be more objective, emphasizing facts and linear timelines so you do more research. It values clarity, balance (all sides of a story), and completeness (the whole story). It tends to avoid metaphor and stylistic distortion. It’s rarely the easiest way to build empathy for you subject. Be careful not to keep too much distance from your subject and find ways to make your viewers care.
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Next, tell the story in the first person (I) as an involved participant – “How do I feel?”
What images are needed to tell your viewers the story or you experience with your subject?
This perspective makes it personal and so draws your viewers closer to you by helping them to live vicariously. This viewpoint can become highly subjective and opens up a lot of room for interpretation. It can become like a journal. In translating this to images you might include the traces of things you do and leave behind or even yourself. (Go ahead and stand by or with your subject but be careful not to leave your subject behind.)
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Finally, tell the story in the second person (you) as if you were the subject – “How does it feel to be you?”
What images are needed to tell your subject’s story from the inside out?
This perspective encourages empathy, initially in you and later in your viewers. You can move deeper into this perspective by asking, “If I were you I would sense, think, and feel …” It might seem strange at first to do this with inanimate subjects – like rocks or buildings or roads. Remembering what it was like to be a kid playing these kinds of games will help you a great deal here. (We all know how creative kids can be, so have fun and play a little.) This perspective may encourage you to photograph from different perspectives; get closer or further, lower or higher, or turn around and photograph what your subject might see. Often, this voice will help you discover the most unusual perspectives.
Did you ever wish you could get more out of a slider in Lightroom (or Adobe Camera Raw)?
Here’s how to go beyond the maximum amount a slider allows.
Use Create New Mask and make a Gradient or Brush … outside the image area. Click the gradient outside the border and drag away from it. Or, click the brush outside the border and check the Invert box. Then use one or more sliders to go beyond their maximums.
You can do this as many times as you like. 150%, 200%, 300%, 400%, 500% … there’s no limit.
This is faster and more uniform (less uneven) than brushing the entire frame.
This only works with the sliders available in the Masking panel.
If you want to do this with sliders that aren’t in the Masking panel, open the file in Photoshop and apply the Camera Raw filter.
But wait, there’s more. You can apply this principle selectively too. If you’re in Lightroom or Camera Raw use a brush to add more. If you’re in Photoshop, use a Camera Raw smart filter with a mask. There are no limits.
Find more resources on Raw processing here.
Learn more in my digital photography workshops.