How to gaussian blur in photopea
How to Blur Backgrounds in Photopea
Timecodes:
in this video i'm going to show you how
to blur the background of an image so
that the subject really stands out
hi there and welcome to the video so as
you can see i've already got an image
loaded here which you can download from
a link in the description box below
and it's a photographer against the busy
city background now we want to isolate
him more from the background and make
him stand out by blurring the background
even more it is blurred already now
straight from the camera as you can see
with some natural out of focus areas but
it's still very busy to the eye and i
want to just take that stage further
so we're just going to start by
duplicating the background layer twice
so that's control or command j
depending if you're on a pc or mac let's
do that twice we'll call the top layer
let's rename it call the top layer
subject
just keep organized and the layer below
i'm just going to call vg for background
blur background blur
now what i want to do now is make a
selection
of the subject so in this case the
photographer now i'm going to use the
pen tool for this but you can use the
lasso tool or whatever method you're
comfortable off to make a selection of
the photographer
so i'm going to click on the pen tool
here
i'm going to go up and just make sure at
the top it's on path and not shape
because photo p defaults the pen tool to
shape which is kind of annoying because
it's used for a path most of the time
and then also if you're using the pen
tool just make sure that this mode is
set to subtract
to make sure that it honors gaps in
between other areas otherwise it'll just
have one big filled in selection
so what i'm going to do now is just
start making a path
around
the photographer's outline
now this isn't going to be a tutorial on
how to use a pen tool
but as i said use whatever
method you feel comfortable with
you have to be fairly accurate but it
doesn't have to be completely super
accurate if you're a few pixels out here
and there it's not going to make a huge
difference a few moments later
okay so now as you can see i've got a
completed path around a subject and to
turn this into a selection you can
either drag it down to this selection
icon at the bottom or you can just
simply press control or command and then
just click on the icon of the path
itself and it will turn into a live
selection
so now we want to go back to the layers
panel and on this subject layer at the
top we'll now click on the layer mask
icon to transfer this or should i say
convert this selection into a layer mask
if we turn the other two layers off you
can see
the photographer is now cut out
on his own on the top and that's the
important stage
in the first stage in making this happen
i'm going to go into the mask properties
here by just clicking on the layer mask
and then going up to properties mask i'm
just going to feather this a little bit
because as you can see it was quite
sharp i just want to feather it a little
bit maybe 0.8 there
and just get the edges a little bit
smoother
and that will just help when we work on
the background
so we've now selected our subject we've
isolated him
and now what i'm going to do
is a couple of steps on the black
background blur layer just to make this
right now we can't just blur this
straight away because it will actually
take pixels of the photographer that are
on the layer underneath and actually
blur them outwards and we'll get this
horrible halo so what we need to do to
fix this is
whilst you're on the bg blur layer
control or command and click on the
layer mask above
to load a selection
of the out photographer
but we're bearing in mind we loaded the
selection from there but we're still on
the background blur
layer
and now what we're going to do is go up
to the select menu
modify
expand
and i'm going to do this between it
depends on the image but for this
something between three and five pixels
so i'm going to leave it at four click
ok
now this is just taking that selection
we've just loaded and just increased it
out slightly to capture a few more
pixels make sure it captures enough
pixels
and now we want to do well it's still
live the selection is still live we're
going to go to edit
fill
and the fill type we're going to change
the content aware and click ok
this might take a few moments but
basically what we're doing is on the
layer we're going to blur the background
on we're trying to use content aware
fill to just get rid of a lot of the
information that would be the
photographer underneath and replace him
with bits of background which means that
when we blur this layer it's going to be
a lot more
it's going to be a lot cleaner result so
here we go if i just
if i just
reveal that layer
you can see it still looks messy but the
main dark pixels of the photographer are
gone
and this is important because it will
help us get a cleaner result
so now we've done that step
we're going to turn the bg blur
background into a smart object
and this is just so when we're blurring
it in a moment we can always come back
and tweak the blur as many times as we
like
so now we just need to decide
how and how much we're going to blur so
go to the filter menu
go to blur you've got a lot of options
here now we'd normally use this gaussian
blur but for this i like to use lens
blur just because it's a little bit more
natural looking and also it has a
built-in option to add a little bit of
noise back into the shot to make it look
a bit more realistic
so for this the only properties we're
interested in
is really is
the shape here
and radius now all this will do is
the lower size like a triangle it's like
the aperture shape
um will give you a little bit rougher
results let me put it on the triangle
and i'll show you if i drag the radius
right up this is going to go too much
now but it's just so you can see what's
happening
just drag it up here
now if i change that triangle to octagon
say which is on the other end a lot of
sides it should give a smoother result
there we go things are a bit more
blended i quite like it somewhere in
between so i'm going to go hexagon and
i'm not going to go that that much
blurred
it because it's a bit too much
you don't want to blur it too much
because then it gets into the realms of
looking a bit abstract
so let's say somewhere around there i'm
going to go down to our noise because as
you can see the subject
has got quite a bit of grain on him and
the background just looks super smooth
so it looks a little
um just looks a little fake so we're
going to go to
monochromatic on this and i'm just going
to add a little bit of noise
you want to just try and match it
roughly to how much is on the subject
you can always come back and tweak it
later something like that's good and
click ok
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