Before & After: Adding Bokeh
Jul 22nd, 2010 by jeremy
In my post yesterday I highlighted a few photos from our company outing where I shot a lot of candids of the day where we all had fun. One of the photos was of my co-worker and his young daughter enjoying the waterfront, as most little kids love to do.
The shot was a candid like the rest, shot with my versatile Sigma 50-500 lens. Because it was so bright, and the limitations of the lens, most of the entire scene was in focus. Unlike a portrait setting, I didn’t think about distracting elements in the background and just dealt with the lighting conditions as best as I could.
They loved the shot, and want to print & frame it, so I decided to play with a little post-processing to see if I could improve the image. I had read and seen examples of people using the Alien Skin Bokeh plugin to blur the background, so I downloaded the trial version to see what I could do with it (versus doing it by hand). After learning the various settings & options I was pretty happy with the results. Adding in a few “content-aware” and patch tool edits to remove distracting elements, the end result is what you see above. I was pretty happy with the results of just a few minutes of edits.
I was happy with how easy the tool was to use. I made a selection of the dad & daughter before entering the plugin, then used the “planar” setting to do a foreground to background blur emulating an 85mm f/2 DOF.
For comparison, here is the original photo again. Quite a difference.
