Fake The Fall-Off

Use the Lens Blur filter to soften cluttered backgrounds to create a realistic depth-of-field effect, with shallow James Paterson

A blurred background can be a beautiful thing; it helps to focus attention on your subject and gives images a polished, photographic look that sets them apart from snaps and smartphone pics. However, it’s not always easy to achieve the effect in-camera. Luckily, when the background is too sharp and cluttered for your liking, you can mimic the blur.

But first it’s worth spending a moment to consider how sharpness and softness works in an optical sense, as this makes it easier to fake the fall-off in Photoshop. When we focus on a point in a scene, there’s an area of sharpness that stretches out in front of and behind that point – about one-third in front, two-thirds behind – with a gradual fall-off to softness either side of our sharp plane of focus.