Photoshop Tutorials

Today I’m going to teach you how to create two great effects for photo retouch. The first can actually be used on almost every photos and maybe other graphics to. The second is best suited for portraits or other pictures where there is an object that’s in focus so… Let’s start!

In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we're going learn how to add creative focus to an image using Photoshop's Lens Blur filter, which has been available in Photoshop since Photoshop CS (which means you'll need Photoshop CS, CS2 or CS3 for this tutorial). When most people think of adding a blurring effect to an image in Photoshop, they immediately think of the Gaussian Blur filter, which has been around in Photoshop since the days of the dinosaurs (they used Photoshop BC back then). While Gaussian Blur is still a great filter with plenty of uses, it doesn't offer us much in terms of control over the blurring effect and usually needs to be paired up with a layer mask for it to be of any real use. Photoshop's Lens Blur filter, on the other hand, offers an incredible amount of control over the effect (more than you'll most likely ever need), and when used with an easy-to-create Depth Map, as we'll see in this tutorial, we can specify exactly how much blurring to apply to different areas of the image, giving us complete creative control over which areas are in focus and which are not.

"In this tutorial, we’ll look at a quick and easy way to use Photoshop to add glamour and soft focus effects to an image. This effect is used a lot on models, but can be applied to other images too for added impact, especially color rich ones. We’ll also make the bunch of techniques into a Photoshop action, meaning that in future it’ll take just one click to apply the effect."