Professional Looking Motion/Blur Effect for Your Images
In this tutorial we’re going to show you how to create a very popular motion blur effect used in many magazine and various other professionally crafted images
1. Open your target image in photoshop, as always the greater the resolution of the image you’re working with, the greater it will demonstrate the effect.
2. First step is to create a copy of your layer, to do this simply drag your existing layer to the new layer button in the layers palette.
3. With our new layer selected, navigate to ‘Filter -> Blur -> Radial Blur’ on the main menu. In the ‘Radial Blur’ dialog, set your blur settings as follows. You can adjust the ‘Amount’ and ‘Quality’ settings as you wish, depending the effect you are going for. My example uses the following settings pictured here:
4. Our image should now look something like this:
5. Next, we’re going to take the eraser tool and use it to expose our subject beneath the blur. With our new layer selected simply use the eraser tool to remove the blur from our subject and expose our orginal layer below.
The brush size you use will depend on the size of your image, my brush settings are as pictured.
Eraser Tool Settings
6. Now we should really see our effect taking shape. I’ve erased away the blur from the my baseball player and left the radiating blur effect around him.
7. Finally, navigate to ‘Image -> Adjustments -> Levels’ on the main menu. Here we will adjust our color levels to further enhance the effect, again depending on the image you’re working on, your settings will most likely differ from mine however simply adjust the levels setting the by dragging the level indicators circled below until you’re happy with the effect. These are the settings I used:
8. Voila! Our finished effect. I’ve added some text which of course is totally up to you depending on the project you’re creating.
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This is a nice simple tutorial, well done. However, since it is in cookbook style, step-by-step,I believe that in place of Step 5, even newbies to Photoshop could follow steps that would give them greater flexibility than by using the Eraser tool. They could even be given as an alternative series of steps for intermediate Photoshop users, although I strongly believe that beginners would have no trouble following them,under Step 5, such as:
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5a. While still on the upper layer, click on the icon at the bottom of the Layers palette that is second from the left (it’s called “Add Vector Mask”). A white thumbnail should appear to the right of the image on that layer.
5b. Press the “D” key to assure that your Foreground/Background colors are black and white, respectively.
5c. Make sure the white thumbnail has a double line around it, indicating it is active and that you will be painting on the mask and not the image. If the mask does not have the double line around it, click on it and the double line will appear.
5d. Choose the Brush tool (by pressing the “B” key) and start painting over the image window (although you’ll really be painting on the mask). Make sure the Opacity (in the Options Bar) is set to 100%. Paint over those areas of the image that you want to remain in sharp focus. If you paint beyond an area that you intended to sharpen, press the “X” key, which will reverse the Foreground/Background colors. Continue to paint (but this time with white) to restore the blur to those areas that you unintentionally sharpened, and the radial blur will be restored. When finished with your correction, pressing “X” again will restore black as the Foreground color and you can continue to paint to continue to sharpen other parts of your image.
5e. A creativity option is to set the Brush opacity to a low value, such as 10%, and then paint the mask with black to partially restore the sharpness to the area painted on. Each repeated click and pass-over with the Brush tool will increase the opacity, further sharpening this area, so different effects can be obtained, although in many cases, perhaps most, the user will stop with Step 5d.
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I feel that this addition to your otherwise effective tutorial will add some additional knowledge to the newbie in a very easy and painless manner. I found out that much of what I learned about Photoshop was obtained by following someone’s tutorial.Even after I felt that I had reached a fair level of sophistication, I would often be surprised by what a juicy tidbit I would discover when following some new tutorial. Sometimes it would be a new technique, sometimes a new shortcut, and very often an explanation of a step that gave me a greater insight as to how and why it worked.
As an added note, if I were writing this tutorial, I would probably have added to Step 5d by suggesting that the [ and ] keys could, respectively, be used to decrease or increase the brush size, ,and adding the Shift key to the [ keys could be used to make the brush softer or harder.
I found, and still find, that when I copy and print a tutorial, I will edit out those steps, and even illustrations, that are superfluous for me, thus reducing the number of pages and the cumbersomeness of the tut. But others, who find them necessary at the Photoshop knowledge stage at which they are, will leave them in, and that’s right for them.
I hope you don’t mind these comments. They are made in the sense of constructive suggestions, and I would appreciate your thoughts on my comments.
Ed Gold
i don’t like this emage because it’s not so impressive it so simple