Photo Fun

Sometimes editing is just for fun. Here is a granddaughter shot. The ball was coming at her and she was jumping to get away from it. She didn't, and I got the shot a millisecond before it hit her knee. No damage beyond a bruise, but for the photographer a very lucky shot.

The unfortunate fact was that even with a long lens and a wide aperture she was far enough away, and close to the spectators in the background that the busyness detracted from the shot. Let's see what we can do with those people back there.

My subject here is sharp so that in Photoshop Elements or Photoshop the Quick Selection Tool does really make quick work of selecting my subject. As you move the tool over the subject more and more of her is selected, if any spots are missed, more "clicking and dragging" adds the missed areas. As you drag usually areas outside your subject will be selected. In this case the space between the bat and the helmet was selected. Hold the Alt key and click areas selected by mistake and they will be removed from the selection. Keep going with the Click and the Alt Click until the subject is accurately selected.

My plan here is to blur the background and let my subject pop but I've selected my subject and I need to select the background. Thank heavens the program makes that very easy. Click Select>Inverse and you've now selected everything but the subject. The keyboard shortcut for this is Shift-Ctrl-I. I use keyboard shortcuts whenever possible as they speed up the editing process tremendously. Notice when you use the menus any commands that have a shortcut show it to the right of the selection. Esc to close the menu, use the shortcut, and presto, you've begun to memorize another editing speed up.

Now we have all those distracting folks selected, what do we do? We blur them. From the menus choose Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur. There are more and more ways of blurring being added to the menu but Gaussian works very well for this job. A small window appears with a slider labeled Radius. Make sure Preview is checked and you will see the blur on your image. Sliding the Radius slider to the right increases the amount of blur and remember this is "Photo Fun" so I went pretty crazy and slid it to about 50 pixels and here's what I got.

I did crop a little off the top and bottom and made an almost square image and now look at what we have. Absolutely no question of what is our subject. We see that there is something behind her but only imagination gives us a clue as to what it might be. Notice I was careful to keep the bat and the ball in my original selection because they are very important to the composition.

Blurring a little less would have made the result a little more realistic and believable as depth of field blur but I wasn't interested it reality I wanted a little fun and I was trying to impress my granddaughter. She loved it. I succeeded.