Your confusion is fueled by a general lack of understanding.
Now I am going to re-post what I feel to be both one of the best explanations we've seen on this forum, and what will throw doo doo in the face of about 90% of the people on the forum that think they know what it means.
First, in my own words, any Blur is absolutely positively NOT Bokeh!
There is no such thing as bad bokeh, nor good bokeh, bokeh already means it is "good" or "pleasing".
rdenney wrote in post #2320659
We should keep in mind a few points when discussing bokeh:
1. Bokeh is about the rendering of out-of-focus highlights, not specifically about depth of field. Out-of-focus highlights may be rendered with a harsh edge, a neutral edge, or a faded edge. The neutral edge shows a lens with the best overall correction, but the faded edge is the thing most people are meaning when they talk of good bokeh.
2. Bokeh is not about
quantity of blur. You'll get more blur with longer camera-to-subject distances (allowed by longer lenses) and with wider apertures. It's quite possible that a fast lens with poor bokeh will provide a more nicely blurred background than a slower lens with excellent bokeh. The Canon 70-200/4L provides excellent bokeh, but it won't blur the background as much as an 85/1.8 when used at 1.8, though you might get close by backing up and using the 200mm end. A photo with profound use of selective focus to isolate the subject is not necessarily an example of good bokeh, but rather an example of selective focus. If the blur is smooth rather than edgy or clumpy, then it also has good bokeh. Good bokeh is mostly what produces the creamy three-dimensional effect for which old Sonnars are justifiably famous.
3. Bokeh is not about aperture shape, though you can see the shape of the aperture in out-of-focus highlights, especially if the lens has bright-edge bokeh. Some lenses have poor bokeh even wide open when their apertures are round.
4. It's not about lens quality. In fact, good bokeh depends on a bit of undercorrected spherical aberration, though that usually is corrected out at smaller apertures.
5. You can't generalize about bokeh. Lens design is the primary influence, but not the sole influence, and can be overcome by other factors. Each lens really should be evaluated on its own merits. Lenses with more aperture blades may or may not have smoother bokeh. Lenses with more or fewer elements, faster or slower, prime or zoom, or any of the other things people generalize about, may have good or bad bokeh.
6. A bare midriff always looks better than a blurred background, no matter how nicely blurred it is. Therefore, the best bokeh is the one where the subject is so compelling that nobody cares about the background.
See here:
http://www.rickdenney.com/bokeh_test.htmRick "who likes a wide, smooth brush" Denney
Shortly dictionaries and translations may be proferred, but the confusion on this started well over a decade ago. The term has been morphed into something ti wasn't.
If you want to know what the people using this term 15 20 years ago meant, this post above is likely as close as you will get.
When Canon (A Japanese Company) published in EF Lens Work sample images and referred t Bokeh, it was an image with round highlights visible,. the highlights were what wa being referred to, not a blurred back ground.
) then something is wrong with the image.
