blurred background pictures

[bigRoN]

I have taken several pictures of my co-workers and trying to add some style to them. I find that the background from inside the Emergency Room is a bit "busy" and distracting from the subject of the picture. For this reason, I have tried to blur the background and try to bring out the subject. Two of the pictures, I did them in drastically different ways. The first one I did was of Dr. Mottalei. Using Photoshop 6.0, I used the Magic Wand to select the him. This was long and tidious, adjusting tolerances and adding each little part, until he was completely selected. I then created layers with just the background and just the forground. To the background, I desaturated the colors and applied a Gaussian blur. To the foreground, I messed around a bit and found that I thought it looked a little better with the color very slightly desaturated.

Dr. Mottalei (http://www.pbase.com/image/1449500)

The second picture was of my fellow nurse Shureen. I seperated her from the background differently. I used the Quick Mask feature, using a blurry paintbrush around the border of foreground and background. It appears I used a stronger Gaussian blur on Shureen and instead of desaturating the colors on the foreground I did an auto-contrast.

Shureen (http://www.pbase.com/image/1449491)

[gerry]

These pictures give me another reason to want to stay out of the ER.

But seriously, your work using the selection tool is excellent. I know how hard it is to select. Good work.

:-)

[twalker294]

Ron,

I think that first one looks much better. The second one looks fake -- it is obvious that you blurred the background in an image editor. Not that the picture looks bad -- sometimes you may want that kind of effect. But if you are trying to mimic the effect of a large aperture and make it look realistic, the first one is much better.

Todd