Have you ever noticed beautiful photos often have a perfect focus on the subject and a lovely, blurred background? You don’t need to be a professional photographer! Anyone can achieve this effect with a few tweaks in Photoshop.
Open your image in Photoshop.
1.
From the top menu, go to select > choose ‘select and mask’ from the dropdown menu.
2.
Choose your preferred view mode in the properties panel (I chose overlay, but you can decide your preference).
3.
Select the Quick Selection Tool from the left side menu. Select the + . Click- drag the area that you want for the final selection. These areas will start to come into view. Some areas of the image that you do not want in the final product will likely be selected at this point. Don’t Worry! We will fix this in the next step.
4.
Now let’s remove the areas we don’t want. Select the – and delete any unnecessary selections.
5.
Zoom in to areas that need refinement, such as hair on the head. Select the “Refine Edge Brush.” Click and drag over these areas. Brushing over theses soft areas will add fine details to the selection. You should begin to see the hair separated from the overlay.
6.
Once the selection is as desired, you‘re ready to output to a new layer mask. Under “Output to,” select “New Layer with Mask,” and hit “OK.”
7.
Hit the background layer to return to normal view.
8.
Next we must remove the subject from the main image. Duplicate the background layer and hit the eye icons on the other layers so that only the duplicate background layer is selected. Use the lasso tool to select the subject. Loosely draw around the subject with the lasso tool. Once complete, you should see the “marching ants” around the sunject.
9.
Go to the edit menu and fill the selection with the content Aware tool. Edit > Fill.
Select Content Aware on the popup. You should see the selection disappear, but the marching ants remain.
10.
To remove the marching ants, we must deselect the selection. Go to the Select menu > Deselect. The subject should be removed.
11.
Now it’s time to add a blur to the layer. Go to the Filter menu, hover on Blur, and select Lens Blur.
12.
Adjust the blur radius to your preference and hit OK. Hit the eye icon on the mask layer to make your subject visible, and you should have an image with a beautiful, blurred background.
