Driven to Distraction

Depth of field. It’s that fabulous effect of a soft, slightly blurry background (and sometimes foreground too) that brings the subject of our shot into sharp focus and minimizes distractions. It’s easily achievable with manual settings on our DSLRs and with some settings on our phones. We all know how it makes our photos look better, but we don’t always have control over it. I snapped this photo of the CN Tower in Toronto with my cellphone. Because of the distance involved even with “portrait” settings, which should have given me a preferential focal point, the whole shot is in the same focal plane. I’m going to show you haw to fake depth of field quickly and easily using another Guided Edit.

You guessed it! Select the Guided tab, then Special Edits>Depth of Field.

There are two options for this Edit, a Simple one and a Custom one. Today we’re only going to look at the Simple method.

So just click on that Simple bar.

The menu looks like this and your next step is to add a blur to the whole photo.

You can increase the amount of blur by using the slider at the bottom of the panel, both before and at any point during the process.

Then you’re going to select the areas you want to have back in focus. I experimented quite a bit so that I could give you the best information and save you some time and frustration.

The secret to the Simple version, especially if you’re working on a photo with a lot of detail, is to make small changes. Click your mouse inside the area you’re focused on, hold down the left mouse button then drag the mouse a short distance and release. (Please ignore the typo on this screenshot. I’ve tried to fix it and WordPress won’t let me!)

If you make your drags too long, the “spillover” focus will bring areas of the photo you want blurry into focus. You can take the drags in any direction that will work for your image.

If you’re not sure how much of the image has been altered by your last drag, you can zoom in on the image. But you can’t go back in and make more drags on the zoomed in image; the software will revert back to the full image when you click on the Add Focus Area bar again.

So with my photo of the CN Tower, I worked my way down the centre of the tower in short drags until I hit a point where the edges were still being left blurry. Always watch what’s happening as you work. Then if you notice areas you don’t want in focus are suddenly popping, you can quickly and easily Undo (CTRL/CMD>Z) those last couple of changes.

Once I got to the point where the edges were still visibly blurry, I adjusted the angle of my drags, but still keeping the start and end points inside the edges of the tower.

As I got closer to the bottom of the tower, I started seeing the buildings to the sides were starting to pop. Oh no you don’t! I changed my strategy again and used some horizontal drags again.

This is particularly important in images with more detail, both in the focal area and the background. Go slowly.

It was at this point that I started to notice that the software created more focus at the beginning of a drag than at the end. So again, I shifted my strategy from going left-right to going right-left. Problem solved!

But before I shut Elements down, I wanted to try it again to see if I could reduce the number of drags needed to get the focus where I wanted it without messing with the blur too much. So I started again, this time taking longer vertical and slightly angled drags.

Here’s a zoom view of the observation deck.

The angled drags were longer than in my first effort, but not running top to bottom as I had done when I was first figuring out how to make this Edit really work.

I cut the number of clicks down by at least 50% and still had a result I was pleased with. So give it a try, Undo as needed and see how you like it!

I have some more photos I want to play with, and you just might see some of them in the Gallery one of these days!

Clusters… Have Them Your Way, the Easy Way!

I’m a big fan of templates. They’re an amazing time-saving tool for getting layouts done, while still allowing for individual style. But once in a while I go rogue and design a layout without using any time-saving devices. And sometimes I shock myself by creating a perfect cluster that looks fantastic… only to find that when I try to recreate it later, I can’t get it quite right. Of course there has to be a WSNH hack for that! And I’m going to show it to you. I’m using a cluster I created for Katie, Ooh La La Scraps‘ genius designer, with her Freezing collection.

If you save your layouts as a PSD file, this part will be super-easy. If not, you’ll be starting from scratch and might want to wait until you have that AHA! cluster creation at a later date.

Let’s assume you’ve got the layout in PSD form. Open up the file in PSE. Then select all the layers of that perfect cluster. To select multiple layers, hold down the CTRL/CMD key as you click on them. Once you have all the layers selected, right-click in the Layers panel and click on Duplicate Layers. (We’ve done this part before.) In the submenu that opens up, select New Document and click OK. A completely new work space will now be there for you to work on separate from your original layout.

Once you’ve got all those layers on your new work space. turn the visibility to all the layers off, except for the one on the very bottom. (Or you can work from the top down, your choice. I work from the background out.)

Now you’ll select a colour to make the place marker for that first layer. Whatever floats your boat… gray, pastel, dark, light, whatever makes sense to you. You’re going to make a New Fill Layer on top of that first layer to create your place marker.

If you’ve never used the Fill Layer function, you’ll be in for a treat. It makes a lot of things much easier! Click on Layer>New Fill Layer>Solid Color.

Make sure you click the box to the left of Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask.

See what happened? All those little beads are blaaaah yellow, but they’re now a place marker for a scatter. You’ll notice that the shadow style is preserved, which is another time saver. But… that shadow style will disappear with the step after this one, unless you copy it. Right-click on the original layer and choose Copy Layer Style.

Then select both the original layer and the clipping mask layer to Merge them. Right-click on the layers, then choose Merge Layers, or CTRL/CMD>E. Once the layers are merged, right click on the new merged layer and Paste Layer Style to it. Voilà… the layer has a shadow again.

Continue on with all the layers in your cluster, using the same process. Change up either the colour or the intensity of each different layer so you can easily see the different components of your template later. When I was putting together the screenshots for this tutorial the whole thing took me about 11 minutes, bottom to top.

This is what my finished cluster template looks like.

When I had all the layers converted to place markers, I renamed each layer. You can right-click and select Rename Layer, or simply double-click on the label within the layer’s box in the Layers panel then just type in whatever works for you.

Now you want to save the fruits of your labour! File>Save As (Shift>CTRL/CMD>S), tell the software where you want to save it, then give your cluster a name.

Tell the software you’re saving the file as a PSD and you’ll have your very own, personally-designed cluster template to use again and again!

I think next week we’ll do another Guided Edit. See you then!