On 11-07-21 12:45 PM, Steven Desjardins wrote:
I took this shot with the Pentax A50 1.7 on a Lumix G2 body. I like
the sharpness and contrast of the flower but the background was too
busy. It was easy to select the flower and then gaussian blur the
background? I'm not big on heavy manipulation but I kind of like
this. Any suggestions of my primitive blurring technique?
http://drd1135.smugmug.com/Photography/pdml/15174580_NVzVH#1394204051_PhPRRcS
Steve, I think that came out fairly well, but there's a light hazy white
halo around that flower that looks out of place and rather gives away
the photoshopping. But that's not too hard to fix.
When you cut out the flower to isolate it off the layer you're going to
blur, you probably left a transparent cutout where the flower was. When
you blur the layer, the transparent hole acts like white and mixes in
with the green shades to lighten them near the flower.
So, after you cutout the flower, use the clone brush to duplicate some
of the green background surrounding the cutout into the cutout area;
basically create more background *behind* where the flower was. Then
blur that whole layer and superimpose the flower back over it.
The other thing you can do is use layer effects to darken the edges of
the flower a little.
I think it's worth another pass to improve on the effect to make it more
real.
-bmw
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