From the fair

tlbrooks · Oct 16, 2011

I shot this at our state fair with a Canon Elph 10mp point n shoot. I love the beatiful yellow and the whimsical nature of the 3 flowers. What I don't like is the excessive depth of field. I just bought the latest version of PS Elements 10 and I'm learning how to use it. What's the best way to blur out the background or what would you do to this photo?

tirediron · Oct 17, 2011

Because of the small sensor size of P&S cameras, the DoF is much greater than on cameras with standard size sensors. What you could do is create a layer consisting of the flowers and then apply a light Gaussian blur to the background, but be careful, as it's easy to overdo and will look worse than doing nothing if it's excessive.

Compaq · Oct 17, 2011

Yup, what Tirediron said. If you apply too much gaussian blur, it will look like you're looking through a foggy window (just a comparison I came up with when I was in a PS-related philosophical mood

)

One thing to keep in mind is that our brain thinks that things close to the stuff in focus should not be as much out of focus as stuff far away... if that made any sense

It depends on how much work you're willing to put into this.

copy back ground layer ==> apply blur on copied layer ==> apply a layer mask on copied layer with blur ==> have layer mask selected, choose brush tool with foreground colour and background colour white ==> using black erases the blur (erases the layer mask) whereas white brings back the blur (brings back the layer mask). Youtube might be your friend.

SabrinaO · Oct 17, 2011

Nice picture! But yeah... since the fence is soo close to the flowers go easy on the gaussian blur. Id actually blur out the two flowers on the right too a tiny bit and keep the one closest to you the sharpest.

SabrinaO · Oct 17, 2011

This is what i'd do..

KmH · Oct 17, 2011

I would use lens blur instead of gaussian blur.

However, as close as the flowers are to the background I would just fix the exposure add a bit of the Clarity slider in ACR, sharpen, and not add any blur at all.

tlbrooks said:

With lens blur:

tlbrooks · Oct 17, 2011

Thanks for all your suggestions. SabrinaO and KmH, I like what you both did! It looks a lot better. What about putting the background into shadow? Not sure how to go about doing that without just going black which I don't think would look good.

Tom