There are times where the subject of a photo is “outshined” by the distracting background and thus failed to bring out the feeling that the photographer meant to portray. To ensure a subject is really outstanding, the colour must be contrasting enough and the background must be blur enough to make the front subject really seems outstanding. With photoshop, you can literally bring any subject out to make viewers focus better on the intended effect.

I had helped to cover for an basketball competition organized by one of my close friend in NUS sometime back last year. There is this really interesting photo that captured the expression of this guy in “total despair” when trying to block his opponent shooting a basket.

In the original photo, the striking colours of the background and the players give too much of a distraction to the photo and the subject cannot stand out for the X Factor.

How do I make the background blur and the colour of the background to become black and white only?

To make the background black and white, you can use the exact same methods that I had posted in “Picking Colour with Photoshop “

Step 1: After you had painted out the colour of the background you don’t want,  you should now see your layer mask having the black figure outline of your subject. The colour of the subject should also be the only remaining colour to be seen.

Step 2:  With the layer mask being selected, go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur. With the layer mask in effect, the only area to be blurred out will be the background only and not the subject. Play with the amount of Gaussian Blur pixels to achieve your preferred effects. For this case, the level of the blur is set to 3.5 pixels.

Conclusion: This Photoshop technique can bring another new life to those normal photographs that people normally thought nothing much of. Try it with those photos that you had keep inside your cold storage to see how fun it can be to make your photographs look better. It all about digital imaging, isnt it?