Quick Photography Tips

The Lensbaby is a lens with moving parts that allows you to selectively blur parts of a photo as you’re taking it. It’s a great piece of kit for a bit of fun but it’s fairly expensive. In this Photoshop tip I’ll show you how to get a similar effect in Photoshop. This tip can also be used to get the blurry edges characteristic of the Lomo Holga.

We’ll start with this photo by FaceMePLS…

The photo doesn’t really have a clear focal point so let’s give it one with a Lensbaby effect.

Start by duplicating the layer - this keeps the original safe in case we want to come back later and redo our lens blur. Now select the Channels tab (next to the Layers window) and click on the folded paper icon at the bottom of the window to create a new channel (it will be called Alpha 1 by default) which we’ll use to define how much different parts of the image get blurred.

When you create the Alpha channel, the original image gets hidden so lets reveal it again by clicking on the empty square box next to the RGB channel. This will bring the image back with a semi-transparent red layer over the top (if you’ve got Photoshop set up with the defaults). The red layer represents our mask.

From the Toolbox, select the Gradient Tool (under the Paint Bucket Tool if you can’t see it). In the toolbar that appears at the top, select a black to white gradient, select the Radial gradient (second from the left) and check the mode is set to normal and Reverse in unchecked. Now with the Alpha channel selected click on your desired focal point and drag outwards towards the edge of the image. The Alpha 1 channel should now look like this…

…and your image will look a bit like this (the red layer fades out from the focal point)…

Now select the RGB layer in the channels tab and go to Filter > Blur > Lens Blur. In the Iris section, set the Radius to around 15 (depending on how much blur your want) and then in the Depth Map section go to the Source drop-down and select our Alpha 1 layer. You should now see in the preview that the lens blur is applied increasingly outwards from your focal point using the Alpha layer to guide how much the effect is applied. Here’s the final image…

Note: You could achieve a similar effect by just applying a Lens Blur to a layer and then adding a radial gradient Layer Mask but using the method described above gives a look more similar to what would come out of a real lens. This is because a Layer Mask just changes the transparency of the blurred layer whereas using the Depth Map method, Photoshop actually applies the lens blur effect differently across the gradient.

If you like the effect and want to get it in-camera you can buy a Lensbaby from Amazon US / UK.

If you liked this, you might also like these Tilt-Shift videos…