Why would you want to blur a background? Well, the most common reason for this is – when you have an image that has too much clutter in it, the eyes tend to wander off the main subject a little too much. To avoid this happening, photographers try and blur out the background even as they shoot the scene, and this can easily be done with a professional camera. But for the rest of us, and to photographers as well, thank God for photoshop! Let us learn how to blur the background in photoshop.

Im going to use an image of a little girl with a great smile.

Notice how the toys and the clutterin the background kind of grab a bit more attention than required. The eyes tend to wander off our main subject thanks to their presence. We don’t want to remove them altogether, but we will try and fade them out so they are not so prominent any more.

Well open the image in photoshop and then we select the outline of the subject which in this case is the girl and her hat. I use the Polygonal laso tool to do this, but you can use any selection tool of your choice.

Now, remember we do not want to get ‘the rest’ of the image except the girl blurred. But, we wish to create the effect of the background being blurred. What this means is, everything at the same distance as the girl (from the imaginary camera) needs to be in focus, and everything far away should be ‘out-of-focus’. We go further by selecting the area around the child, which is the car bonnet she is leaning on.

Now, we fuzz out the outline of our selection with the feather tool. Go to SELECT > MODIFY > FEATHER. You will need a higher degree of feather for a higher resolution image and vice-versa. Next, we select the SELECT > INVERSE of our selection, that is, the area we want to blur:

Now here comes the fun part. We have selected the area we wish to blur, now all we have to do is to blur it adequately. Go to the FILTER menu, and select the BLUR option, and subselect MOTION BLUR (go ahead and experiment with different variations of blur here).

Use an adequate amount of this blur to  fuzz out the background. It is better to over-blur and then you can fine tune the effect with the FADE BLUR under edit menu.

I have gone ahead and photoshopped a bit more by adding a sepia feel to the whole image. Thats it!