Gaussian Blur followed by Textures

We showed this technique at the Mike Moats Third Annual Macro conference during our "Rust" program....

Our approach to photography is to always take the best possible photograph that we can (there is no "unsuck filter" in Photoshop). More than 50% of our photographs are processed in ACR and then sharpened, so basically SOOC (straight out of camera), but we love the tools that Photoshop and Layers and Masks and Blend Modes and Plugins and Textures provide us as well so the remaining images are processed in Photoshop and we like to pre-visualize what we will end up with as our final artwork.

Sometimes you can change your camera angle and/or aperture to get a pleasing background. But sometimes the subject is not movable is close to the background. For those instances you can apply a Gaussian Blur and a Texture and create your won Artistic interpretation of the scene. Below are two examples of the SOOC and the post-processed versions.

     

1. Duplicate layer
2. Filter --> Blur --> Gaussian Blur
3. Blur to taste to get rid of the background
4. Add a mask
5. Paint with black over the subject, zoom in (100-500%) to go close around the edges, switch to white to unmask background. 
6. Add a Texture (or two)
7. Change the blend mode of the texture (often to multiply for these types of images)
8. Alternatively, use Topaz Texture Effects. Enter the discount use code breaphotos for 15% off Topaz products http://tinyurl.com/topaz-cuchara