I did a really bad job of blurring the background on editing a shot for DOF.

Nathan wrote in post #16686659
depth mapping is the proper way to go about it

lol - nittaya, that's a pretty big girl. kinda hot... but big.

Yeah she does look double sized

yeh. it looked odd but could not figure out what was wrong. till nathan mentioned it.
forgot to resize the girl.

Here is what I generated with the full res, unblurred JPEG. I PMed you the full res.

The image was shot with at 55mm on a 350D. I guesstimated the distance to the subject of about 10 to 15 feet. The DOF ends at about 2 to 3 feet behind the subject for this condition. So, I established the middle ground subjects as partially in focus and the end of the full DOF gradient at the front of the bus, more or less, where the other people are.

I also defringed the shot and added some deconvolution sharpening to counter the f/14 aperture and diffraction in the original.

kirk

Fantastic thread, learned a lot! Thanks to all and especially Kirk, and to Douglas for the link.

birderman wrote in post #16683726
Well I don't profess to be an PS expert, but since I am learning (well trying to teach myself) I thought I would have a quick and dirty go at this With PSE....hope you don't mind...
I duplicated the layer and created mask of the girl and edit the mask to use gradient fill to protect part of the road in same focal plane as girl, I then applied guassian blur, I also tried to lighten the distracting shadow on the road and dodge the girls face to bring out some shadow detail and applied some hue/saturation adjustment to the background.

This is only a quick edit whilst at work so the selection and masking might not be the most accurate but it would be interesting to get some feedback on the ideas attempted.

Hosted photo: posted by birderman in
./showthread.php?p=166​83726&i=i194386055
forum: RAW, Post Processing & Printing

Wow, horrible.... I wish the original was still available so I could see why the edit was so poor.

nittaya wrote in post #16684022
i think bluring the background in post processing most often looks weird. better approach is to replace the background . here is one attempt . it is a quick edit so it has many flaws but if one spend little bit more time in post processing , it is possible to avoide those flaws.

Omg, either she is a twelve foot giant or you placed her on a miniature set strait out of Hollywood.

kirkt wrote in post #16684075
I'm not sure what the DOF was like in the original, but here is a quick fake using the Lens Blur filter in PS with the rough depth map inset in the image. The blur is a little too much, but I did it that way so you could see what was going on - the blur I applied was on top of that in the original posting, so that also adds to the slight strangeness.

In my depth map, the area of the gradient at the mid gray should probably be pushed further back, to an area between the middle group of 5 people sand the background group of people.

kirk

Perfect! That's exactly how it's done. Good job mate,

Rather than just commenting 'horrible' bigalz1 something more constructive would have been more useful. Considering I already commented that this was quick attempt at the idea using PSE. Whilst its not perfect, I think the Gaussian Blur has been overdone, and maybe I should of tried lens Blur instead, but not having tried it before wasn't quite sure on using it in PSE. I believe the methodology was along the right lines but poorly executed especially when someone as skilled as Kirkt shows the correct techniques to be applied. In the end we are all here to learn and there is something we will always discover.....

It's my personal belief that you add help and advice when you can give it properly. A poor, "quick", and incorrect edit is exactly what he was trying to avoid. So therefor you did for him what he didn't want to do.
I guess that explanation would have been better,

BigAlz1 wrote in post #16696570
It's my personal belief that you add help and advice when you can give it properly. A poor, "quick", and incorrect edit is exactly what he was trying to avoid. So therefor you did for him what he didn't want to do.
I guess that explanation would have been better,

I think your comment is still more your opinion rather than constructive criticism, it would be more helpful to everyone to explain why you think it is horrible and what the issues are. Surely to help people learn the idea is not to do the work for them but to point them in the right direction which I think the description I gave in post does because I explained it was a quick edit in PSE to try out and show the techniques. It would also appear that given the limitation of PSE compared to PS my methods were along the right lines albeit poorly executed according to some. Therefore I believe that it was not necessarily poor advice or incorrect edit just a different approach to the problem. In retrospect maybe I overdone the blurring so that it was more obvious of the parts that I was applying the blur to so that a discernible difference from the original was more obvious. For a constructive comment one should advice on what elements are poor such as: is the masking bad, too much blur, wrong type of blur filter etc. and suggestions on alternatives or improvements. Just making a statement that something is horrible doesn't help anyone improve or others to see what's wrong and how it may be fixed and therefore nobody gets to learn anything.

I feel that it was a horrible solution. There wasn't need to break down your work. It's like giving the wrong answer to a question. No need to tell you why it's wrong based on the simple fact it wasn't right.
That statement may not seem very nice but it's truthful. If you're looking for positive cc on you're edit I would be more than happy. But that isn't what this thread was about.
Not personal, it was just wrong. No hard feelings....?