background editing

Hiya just want some advice realy. Im quite new to this and havent got a clue bout editing. Ive taken a few nice shots (i reckon anyway) but am not sure how to edit them. Ive got nice shots where the background is too busy and vice versa. How do I blur or define backgrounds? also is there a way to make the background one colour?
Is this a stupid question or what?
:shrug:

In short - it's fiddly. If you have photoshop, check out the tutorial on the subject on youtube.

The basic jist is - make a selection of what you want to keep, create a new layer with just that, and then fuzz out the other layer (which includes the background).

I'm not a pro at doing what you're asking, but I'm sure someone here will be able to help. However, if you post what type of editing software you're using, that would probably speed up the responses. Good luck.

Yeah cheers, at the mo Im just using GIMP and the stuff that comes with a canon. However im looking into gettin something else, so any ideas on that are greatly accepted!
Thank you

it is fiddly: here is an example of a photo i did this with.


original:

as you can see the background in all in focus (pretty much) and very distracting from the focal.


Blurred:


in photoshop:

- to start with i duplicated the background layer to get a copy of the original photo. i then went to filters>blur>gaussian blur and chose a suitable setting for what i wanted (the choice is yours and depends on the size of the photo your editing) dont make it too blurry else it looks very unreal like it could never have come from a camera.
- i then added a layer mask to this top layer and started to paint using a soft brush and a black colour to get the rough covering of the lady.
- i then took a much smaller softbrush to do the edges.

this looks ok but isn't brilliant as you end up with strange edges in places where the blur has made a slight haze around the focal. This would not occur in a shot where a shallow depth of field had blurred the background; so this needs to be sorted.

-duplicatae your blured layer with its layer mask as well. (If anything goes wrong you can just start again from the first blurred layer by deleting your duplicate and duplicating again.) Then unclick the eye in the layers palette on your first blurred layer so it can't be seen.
- get a smudge brush (softbrush, about 80-90% strength) and smudge the colours around the edge away into the masked area of the top layer. doing this you can get rid of that blurry halo around the sharp part of the subject.

Before (with blurred halo):




After (without blurred halo):


If done correctly you can make the blur look very genuine as it would from a camera with a shallow DOF.



End product after mono and a few extras:




the above only works if the subject in definitely infront of the background and nothing else in the photo is on the same level as it/them. If something is then it becomes much harder to make look genuine.

This takes a lot of time but can make the end result look much better than the original.

Its probably possible to do very similar things in other software but i dont know how...

Hope this was helpful, it's first proper tutorial i've written.

thank you soooooo much for that! I am very impressed with how youve written that, so easy to follow! I am now gonna sit and play around and see what I can come up with!
Thank you