Wednesday, February 08, 2006

radial blur

I was playing around again last night with a photo i had taken on the weekend and ended up with a cool effect. The first half comes to us from photoshop user magazine (dec 05) and the second half from yours truly.
Open photo you want to use. Works well with images with subject in middle of frame.
Press command - j (pc: control - j) to duplicate the background layer.
Go under filter menu, under blur, and choose radial blur.
Enter 6 for amount, choose spin for blur method, and best for quality.
Click ok to apply.
We now want to restrict the blur to where you want it.
Click on the add layer mask icon at the bottom of the layers palette.
Choose the brush tool and set foreground color to black.
Choose a medium sized soft edged brush and begin painting over the parts you dont want blurred (the girl in this photo).
This will mask out the blur. If you make a mistake and paint over something you do want blurred just hit your x on the keyboard (will put white as the forground color) and paint over what you had painted black.
Flatten the layers.
Hit command - j to duplicate the background layer again.
Choose image - adjust - desaturate.
Now hit the layer mask button again and paint in black with a low opacity (i used 24%) over the parts of the image you want the color to show through in.

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