Make Portraits Pop With Blur

Add drama to ordinary photos with a little background blur.

Dave Johnson

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Feature: Making Portraits Pop with Blur

I love that magic moment in the movies when the hero emerges from the mist to save the day. One moment, all you see is fog. Then, a second later, the hero emerges triumphantly to set things right, often in very nick of time, and the movie ends happily. Maybe that's why I like to design portraits with blurry backgrounds; it's like capturing a slice of Hollywood in my photographs.

This week, let's see how to take a fairly ordinary picture--perhaps one of your holiday shots--and jazz it up with some dramatic background blur. We'll blur the background but leave the subject intact. Your subject will pop out of the mist, adding an extra dimension to your picture.

Laying Down Layers

Start by opening a portrait in your favorite image editor. I'll use a picture of my wife, in which I captured her staring dreamily out of a train window. The picture is not very good, especially since the background is quite cluttered.

Our first task is to duplicate the picture in a new layer. If you're using Jasc Paint Shop Pro, choose Layers, Duplicate from the menu. Nothing appears to have changed, but you really have two identical copies of the photo stacked. Anything we do to the picture now will affect the top layer only, leaving the bottom image intact. We'll take advantage of that next when we add the blur.

Blurring the Picture

Now it's time to blur the picture. We won't differentiate between the subject and the background; we'll blur everything at once. In Paint Shop Pro, choose Adjust, Blur, Gaussian Blur. In the Gaussian Blur dialog box, set the Radius to 15 and click OK.

Here's how this setting works: The greater the radius, the blurrier the image will become. The exact value to use is a matter of personal taste. A radius of 15 will render most backgrounds totally abstract; in the image I'm using, that's the effect I want. If you would rather have less pronounced blur so that you can identify the background, set the radius to a lower value, like 8.

Expose the Subject

Now it's time to reveal the subject of our photos. Click the Eraser Tool, which resides in the seventh cubby from the bottom of the toolbar on the left side of the screen. With the Eraser selected, set the Opacity to about 20 or 30 percent. You can find the Opacity in the Tool Options palette at the top of the screen; if the palette is turned off, toggle it on by choosing View, Palettes, Tool Options. By keeping the opacity low, we can avoid getting a dramatic border between the sharp and blurry parts of the picture. While you're up in the Tool Options palette, set the Size of the eraser to about 50.

Now it's time to erase. Click and drag inside the subject's face, and then move around, revealing sharpness wherever you think it's appropriate. The more times you run the eraser over a given area, the more of the blurry layer you'll erase--so you can control the transition from sharp to blurry everywhere in the frame. To exact finer control over the edges of the subject--like in her hair--you can reduce the radius of the eraser.

I cropped the final version of my photo to focus attention on the subject.

Dave's Favorites: Play Jigsaw Puzzles With Your Pictures

A few weeks ago, when I wrote about how you can make creative photo projects using the Photoshop plug-in called Puzzle Pro, reader Judy Beaver from Lafayette, Indiana wrote in with a suggestion of her own: BrainsBreaker. The program isn't an artistic tool; it's a game that lets you create puzzles out of any picture on your computer.

BrainsBreaker is a blast. With it you import a photo, crop it down to the part you want to turn into a puzzle, and select the total number of and shapes of your puzzle pieces. Then the desktop turns into the digital equivalent of your dining room table, complete with puzzle pieces lining the screen edges, a clean work area, and even a slew of "boxes" for storing pieces you don't need to work with right away.

My family has found BrainsBreaker a great way to play with our latest digital photos, and I suspect that it would appeal to the puzzle lover in anyone. You can download a free trial--the load button is disabled, but you can drag digital photo files directly into the program window to try it out. If you like it, you can buy it online for $20.

Q&A: How Do you Know What Values to Use in an Image Editor?

You often tell us to set the Magic Wand's tolerance to 15 or the Feather to 3. How do we determine the correct values for controls like these when you're not around to tell us?

--R.M. Ambrosio, Brockton, Massachusetts

My first instinct was to publish my phone number in this issue, but I thought better of it. Instead of calling me to find out the right value, you can do what I do: guess.

A lot of image editing is about trial and error, and that's the best way to figure out settings like Tolerance and Feather, not to mention Opacity and other editing controls.

Most of the time, though, you can make a good educated guess. Take Tolerance, for instance. Tolerance is the setting that controls how similar colors need to be order for the Magic Wand to differentiate them. You'll usually want to keep this number really low--under 30--to prevent accidentally selecting more than you intended. If it's taking a lot of clicks to get a good selection, though, bump it up higher as needed. Or consider using the Feather tool, which gently decreases the effect of a tool around the edges. Feathering is measured in pixels, so a setting of 10 might be subtle on a 6-megapixel image, but far too much on a small 2-megapixel image.

The bottom line? It's impossible to recommend specific values that work on all pictures because they have different effects depending on the size of the image; and the effect you're trying to achieve can vary dramatically from one picture to another. Try out different values and get used to their relative effects. Once you've got some experience, you can quickly zero in on the right values.

Hot Pic of the Week

Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality, and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $15 and $50.

Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format, at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering, please read the full description of the contest rules and regulations.

This Week's Hot Pic: "Escort Home," by William Schultze, Fredericksburg, Virginia

This photo is not quite what it seems at first glance. In fact, it's a clever composite made from model airplanes. William says: "I photographed these aircraft--a B-25 Mitchell and P-51 Mustangs--while they were being flown at a recent radio controlled model airplane event. Later, I shot the clouds from my front yard. Finally, I combined the scale models and the clouds into a single picture using Photoshop. I meant to depict a bomber returning home after a mission, escorted by the P-51 Mustang fighters."

William took this photo with a Nikon D70.