12 Jan 09 Alien Skin - Bokeh

Hi

After a long time working on our main site we are back with review. Alien Skin has provided us with their collection of professional photoshop plugins and we will start reviewing them in the next few week. It takes that long we they have a lot and are very, very good so we want to grill them

I have started to have a first look at Bokeh which I wanted to use for one of my own photos. The photo “Life Goes By” is a nice photo (see below) but the man isn’t really standing out due to the big depth-of-field and That is what Bokeh does best.

Having never worked with the plug-in before I had first a look at the videos on the Alien Skin website and saw how easy it is altering an image with this software. The steps I took where:

1. Selecting the man with the “quick selecting” tool in Photoshop
2. Create a channel mask of the selection
3. Used a Gaussian blur for the edges of the selection
4. Opened the Bokeh plug-in
5. Selected a 20% Nikon 105mm 2.8 prefix
6. Selected Bokeh - selection - plane
7. and altered the top part of the images
8. Save the work the plug-in had done
9. Opened the plug-in again and repeated step 6
10. but now altered the bottom part of the images
11. saved my work

This all was around 15 minutes work and I hope you agree that it has improved the image a lot.

Our first impression: This plugin is its money worth

The Team

Tags: Alien Skin, Bokeh, Photoshop, Plugin