I have a love for Photoshop. Some people are scared of the word Photoshop. I am here to make you a little bit less scared and teach you some basics! Charlie and I work daily with creating websites, logos, posters, brochures, etc…with our graphic design business. Using Photoshop is a part of our daily routines. I am not saying we’re Photoshop geniuses and know every trick in the book, but we do know our way around the program, so I thought it’d be cool to incorporate some skills into our blog to show you all some tips and tricks.
I want to start with teaching you a basic editing trick to give your photos a bokeh effect. This way, you can add or edit as much as you want to create the perfect photo. A bokeh effect basically means out of focus highlights. Lights usually capture this effect, but sometimes its cool to create your own. And you get all the editing credit and people will think you’re awesome.
- Select a photo…I am using one I took of a boat from Labadee, Haiti.
- I adjusted the hue and saturation to my liking (Hue +5, Saturation +15). Go to “enhance”, “adjust color”, then click “adjust hue/saturation”.
- I then adjusted the sharpness of the image by creating a duplicate of the background layer (right click on the background layer, then click “duplicate layer”). With the duplicate layer selected, where you see the word “normal” with a drop down menu option, click the drop down and then click “overlay”. Then go up to the menu and click “filter”, then hover over “other” and click “High Pass”. I set my high pass at 3.5, but select whichever setting looks good to you for your image.
Before and after of my image:
Your image should now appear more sharp with some brighter colors. We now want to move on to the bokeh effect.
- Click the Create New Layer icon.
- Click the brush tool and click the paint brush icon to get the additional brush options. Then set fade to 5500, hue jitter to 70%, scatter to 60%, spacing to 180% and hardness to 60%.
- Click on the foreground color and then sample a color from your image using the eyedropper tool.
- Drag the brush tool around the area of your image where you’d like the bokeh circles. The brush settings should end up with some variations in color and opacity in the different circles. I set these at a 53% opacity.
- I then set the scatter to 0%, changed the foreground color to white and added some larger circles with different opacities. I made each circle its own layer.
- Click on each individual larger circle, then go to “filter”, “blur”, then “gaussian blur”. I set my radius to 10 pixels. This step just makes the circles a little bit blurry.
- I then went around the image adding in extra smaller circles with no filter, just setting the opacity around 38%
Final Image
