Digital Depth Of Field

It is difficult to achieve depth of field with a point and click digital camera. In this video, Michelle walks you through the steps to achieve this effect using Photoshop/Elements.

Now, to finish the effects on this photo, one thing I want to do is blend out the background. There’s not much visible here, but I do want to get rid of a lot of the detail that is a little bit distracting and it certainly doesn’t add to the photo.

A trick I like to do makes it look like what professional photographers do with the depth of field. With a standard digital camera, you’re probably not going to be able to do this with the basic settings.

I’m going to make a layer, copy that top layer. Then with this top layer , I am going to basically erase this entire background. There’s a couple different ways of doing that. First of all, you can either use your eraser and scroll in really close. I would turn off the layers below it so you can see what’s really going on, and get a really good idea of what you’re doing. As always, zoom in really close so you can get right in there.

There is another option to do that, using the extract filter. To use the extract filter, you’re going to click on your pen. I would select Smart Highlighting. Then you’re going to draw. I’m going to use my stylus. Then we are just going to edit this part out here.

Next make sure that this marker is selected and the Smart Highlighting feature is on. Then you’re going to take your mouse and draw right where you want the part of the image to be extracted. Don’t worry if you don’t stay in the lines because it’s kind of difficult. You can see this green highlight popping up here.

If you go over, that’s fine. Basically, Photoshop will do its best to calculate the difference between the object that you’re trying to separate and the background. It’s not going to be perfect, but it’s going to do the job.

It works much better when there’s a lot of contrast, like the light skin against a dark background. But in the areas where the hat is dark, it might not be very perfect, but we’ll see what we come up with.

Now once you have your image outlined the way you want it, and you’re going to select the paint bucket tool up here in the top left corner. Click on the area that you wanna keep, and it should turn this shade of blue. Click okay.

Now I see I have some residual pixels left over from where I didn’t want it, but we can go in and clean that up. Basically, that’s going to get rid of the majority of the background that you want to get rid of. So I’m going to take my eraser, I want my brush to be a little smaller, and we’re just going to go in. Now, once again, this does not have to be perfect, and you will see why once I’m done.

Now that I’ve cleaned up the image, there’s still some pixels that are missing, but we’re going to be filling those back in. I’m going to go ahead and turn on the layer behind it. You can virtually see that it looks like nothing has been changed.

With that layer selected, I am going to select the filter and blur, Gaussian Blur. Right now, I have the radius set to 7.5 pixels, you can just play around with and see exactly where you want your image to be blurred out in the background.

Kind of liked it like that. Click okay. That brings the main focus of your image up front.