bokeh tutorial #1
The Polka Dot Shirt Trick.
Theory: Bokeh is for more than just background blur and subject isolation, show you love someone by adding hearts to the scene.
Objective: Change a light pattern on a dark garment to hearts.
Let's be honest, it's not often people where polka dot shirts or dresses anymore, I'm not sure why exactly, but this tutorial can apply to almost any bright pattern on dark cloth. Bokeh, as we shall see, is not only helpful for subject isolation, but can also render certain types of clothing with a little touch of romance. Normally I apply bokeh so as to blur my subject against a busy background, but in this frame our subject is well isolated... while this may not seem a great candidate to show off the background blur capabilities of bokeh, it demonstrates how round bright spots can be recreated to make hearts. These bright spots are sometimes incorrectly referred to as specular highlights Let's get to work on this unconventional application of Bokeh.
Figure 1: Our subject Estela is nicely isolated, but her outfit can be retrofitted to hearts instead of dots.
Figure 2: Lets just keep her face sharp. As you can see, the selection is quite small. The settings are heart of hearts, lens of love @ blur 20%... a setting straight out of the box.
Figure 3: With a couple of strokes of the history brush to return detail to our subjects arm, our outfit change is complete. As you can see, the dress now features heart shaped highlights. As if heart sequins had been added to the dress.
Now, this is easy, because we know what bokeh can do, and we setup our model to wear a dress we knew would work. But we shouldn't discount bokeh's ability to turn any bright highlight to a nice, perfectly shaded heart.
Theory: Bokeh is for more than just background blur and subject isolation, show you love someone by adding hearts to the scene.
Objective: Change a light pattern on a dark garment to hearts.
Let's be honest, it's not often people where polka dot shirts or dresses anymore, I'm not sure why exactly, but this tutorial can apply to almost any bright pattern on dark cloth. Bokeh, as we shall see, is not only helpful for subject isolation, but can also render certain types of clothing with a little touch of romance. Normally I apply bokeh so as to blur my subject against a busy background, but in this frame our subject is well isolated... while this may not seem a great candidate to show off the background blur capabilities of bokeh, it demonstrates how round bright spots can be recreated to make hearts. These bright spots are sometimes incorrectly referred to as specular highlights Let's get to work on this unconventional application of Bokeh.
Figure 1: Our subject Estela is nicely isolated, but her outfit can be retrofitted to hearts instead of dots.
Figure 2: Lets just keep her face sharp. As you can see, the selection is quite small. The settings are heart of hearts, lens of love @ blur 20%... a setting straight out of the box.
Figure 3: With a couple of strokes of the history brush to return detail to our subjects arm, our outfit change is complete. As you can see, the dress now features heart shaped highlights. As if heart sequins had been added to the dress.
Now, this is easy, because we know what bokeh can do, and we setup our model to wear a dress we knew would work. But we shouldn't discount bokeh's ability to turn any bright highlight to a nice, perfectly shaded heart.