Things By Mike

On my website GrifballHub.com, I use a lot of game screenshots when posting articles. Using a screenshot directly from the game is fine, but I like to pretty them up a bit. One thing I tend to do, which is very easy, is apply depth of field using Photoshop. It can literally be done in four simple steps. I’m going to show you how it’s done. You can take this tutorial and apply it to any sort of image or photograph, not just video game screenshots.

It will help if you know your way around Photoshop a bit and know where things are located. For this example I’ll be using Photoshop CS3. I know CS4 has been out for a while now, but I’m happy with CS3. It does what I need it to do.

This is the image I’ll be using. It has been resized quite a bit from its original size.

Once you’ve decided on the image you’re going to use for this tutorial, the first thing you want to do is create a duplicate layer. You can do that by going to your layers palette, right clicking on your background layer and choosing to duplicate it.

Now that you’ve duplicated your layer, the next thing you need to do is blur that layer. You could use a gaussian blur, but I like to use a lens blur. You can find the lens blur by clicking on Filter in your top menu and choosing Blur. Here are the setting I chose for my lens blur.

And this is what my image looks like after applying the lens blur. Obviously, as you can see, everything is a blur. Not exactly what we want just yet. I’d like to have the blue character in the foreground be in focus and the characters further off in the distance not be in focus. Easy enough.

In order to do this we need to create a vector mask on the layer of the image we just blurred. You do that by clicking the mask icon on the bottom of the layers pallette.

Now with your vector mask in place, you’re ready to give your image a little depth of field. Grab your gradient tool from your tools menu.

With the tool selected you’re going to drag a gradient out on your blurred layer. In my case, since I wanted the blue character to be in focus, I dragged the gradient to the right, away from him.

If you apply your gradient and don’t like the result, just undo it and try again until you get a result that makes you happy. Here’s how my image looked after applying the gradient.

That’s pretty much it! You now know how to fake depth of field in Photoshop. Pretty easy, eh? You can of course take it further and perhaps apply some color correction to your image, giving it even more character.