Bokeh is a Japanese word that means blur. In photography however, it is widely used to describe the quality of the out of focus elements in photos. In this quick video by DigitalRev, Kai demonstrates how to achieve those sweet-looking Bokeh effects in your images.
[REWIND: HOW TO ADD REALISTIC BOKEH IN PHOTOSHOP]
Different cameras and lenses will produce different-looking bokeh. But unless you have a very bad lens in terms of bokeh, you’ll be able to produce beautiful blur effects.
Of course, you’ll need a lens that has a shallow depth of field to create unsharp bokeh effects. But as Kai points out in the video, just because your background is blurred, you shouldn’t forget everything you know about composition. A very busy background that has a distracting color to it will still keep your photo from being pleasing to look at. Even when it’s blurred.
Your background shouldn’t be way more interesting than your subject, too because the viewer’s eyes don’t know what to look at. For the same reason you should avoid bright, shiny things and lines crossing your frame in the background area.
You also want to consider that the image you see in your viewfinder can look completely different to your final image. By switching to live view you can easily avoid that problem.
What do you think about using blurring parts of your frame out to achieve a nice-looking photo? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!
[via DigitalRev, images via screenshots]
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