[08amczb]

Do you use fake bokeh?
For group shots, where I can't work with shallower DoF I blur the background/forgroud sometimes in PP, but I found it a very hard masking task.
Have you ever did a similar PP. How do you achive natural bluring?

[MossyRocks]

Do you use fake bokeh?

No but I have been known to blur things a bit more from time to time to either tone things down or better isolate something.

[UserAccessDenied]

Never heard of it, but I'm always interested in learning some funky new post processing techniques!

[Mark Ransom]

As you say, the hard part is masking out which part of the image needs to be blurred. Usually if I need to deemphasize the background I'll apply a little vignetting because it's a lot easier.

I've been tempted to do my own software for bokeh blurring, since the gaussian blur available with most programs isn't as good as a good lens will provide.

[clickclick]

eeewwwwwwww

[amoringello]

The Lens Blur feature actually works well and does not behave oddly around mask edges. Varied DOF can also be achieved "decently" with very little extra work.
Opinions on the result, is of course left to opinion.
But if you haven't tried it yet, you might have a go at this feature in Photoshop.
As for the masking.... PS is getting better at making this less painful, but still nothing easy about it in many cases.

[Bruce Clark]

I have not tried it often and I do agree that masking can lead to very fake looking effects. What can work to some extent is applying the blur via a radial filter in Lightroom. With sufficient feathering the transition from sharp to blur can be managed to a certain extent and produce more natural looking results.

[clickclick]

And I know there are times when doing this makes sense, but say it out loud 10 times fast. Just sounds gross - can't possibly be as good as the real thing!

[automorphism]

Arbitrary gaussian blurring of a otherwise fairly sharp area or even the current state of computation smartphone photography is quite ugly.

I do find out of focus areas to sometimes show noise particularly well in lower light so I might apply selective denoising using darktable to those areas (especially green) to make the out of focus area less noisy without losing subject detail.

[amoringello]

The results from Lens Blur isn't an absolute equivalent to the real thing, but here is an example I did many years ago.
I didn't really know what I was doing at the time to do a great job, but the middle image is the original at f22.
One of the others is the same image with Lens Blur, the other taken at f1.4 with the same lens.

It isn't too difficult to tell which is which, by comparison. But I'd say a pretty decent job (especially with the DOF effect) such that most non-photographers would not give it a second look.

[newmikey]

Here's something I posted on a website I discontinued a couple of years ago on my own experimentation with fake DOF techniques using the focus blur plugin on Gimp but trying to achieve a convincing optical result where sharpness transitions were not abrupt but seemed to change with distance. I was able to retrieve the page through the Wayback Machine on the web as I'm not sure where I stored the various files.

My first example was with airplanes on the platform of Amsterdam Schiphol Airport. The original which is really no more than a snapshot:


The depthmap – please note how the shapes of the first plane and the ground equipment have been “cut out”:


And the resulting image after running the focus blur plugin:

[08amczb]

In general I use Lightroom with gradient filter and I adjust the mask with the brush. I turn down sharpness to -60 to -100 and clarity a -10 to -20. If it's not enough I duplicate the gradient filter.
Gaussian blur looks more like an STF lens, in general I like it. I know the lens blur feature, but I never used it apart from some playing with it.

[newmikey]

This example is somewhat different as all I wanted here was to focus the attention of the viewer on the seemingly absurdist contradiction of the old-style Dutch dumpling sales cart with the huge videoscreen showing commercial and technical airport propaganda. The original shot again:


The depthmap, in this case engineeed to “lift out” these two things:


And, of course, the resulting image:


I hope the examples have succeeded in giving you ideas on how you can apply this technique on your own shots. I cannot emphasize enough that the construction of the depthmap is the most essential step in the process. Think before you start! Where do you want the focus to be? What do you want the effect to accomplish?

The final step where you set the maximum blur is really quite uninteresting. Stick with reasonably high values to start with and experiment, experiment, experiment!

[08amczb]

Mikey, I like your example! Although the wing near to us shoud be masked more precisly, the shape of the mask is visible and it's also "friging" a little. The image looks like a miniature effect with a tilt lens.

---------- Post added 08-31-18 at 12:19 PM ----------

Did you ever try to merge a close focus bokeh, an infinity focused bokeh and the correctly focused image image?

[clickclick]

These samples look good. How much time would you estimate to make the masks etc.? I know the more complex the image, the more time, but just generally speaking, what's the level of effort?