Brindley Statue Tutorial

This tutorial uses blurring to increase the perception of distance in a photograph to make the subject stand out from the background. The photo is of the James Brindley statue that stands between the forks at the end of the Coventry Canal. One advantage to digital cameras is that they can take photos which remain sharp for a large depth into the frame. In this case, that sharpness is a disadvantage, since it tends to make the statue blend into the background. The original image is shown at right, and the orginal size is 1536 x 2048 pixels.

In Photoshop Elements, Enhance > Auto Levels was applied to the image to increase the contrast, and the layer was duplicated twice using Layer > Duplicate Layer. The topmost layer was chosen, and then the process of selecting the statue was begun. The magnetic lasso tool was used to select along the outline of the statue with a feather of 0, the anti-alias option checked, a width of 10 pixels, an edge control of 10%, and a frequency of 57.

Since there was mostly a high degree of contrast between the statue and the background, this created a reasonable selection for most of the statue, but missed some areas, like in the hair in the image below left. The selection brush was used to finish the selection in the image below center. Two soft brushes of 13 and 5 pixels were used to touch up the selection.

Magnetic Lasso	Selection Brush	Deleted Background

After the selection was finished, it was inverted to contain the background and not the statue, and the background was deleted from the top layer. The image above right shows the top layer with the layers under it hidden.

Next the top layer was hidden and the middle layer made visible in the image below left. That layer was blurred with Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur with a radius of 4.0 pixels to create the middle image below. Unhidding the top layer produces the image at right below.

Middle Layer	Middle Layer Blurred	Top and Middle Layer Together

While this nicely blurs the background, it's too blurry in the front of the image, and it doesn't look natural. This is solved by using the eraser tool on the middle layer. A 100 pixel brush at 100% opacity was used to erase the foreground area of the image to the "desktop" of the statue. Then the same brush was used at 50% opacity to erase farther into the background. The middle layer with the other layers hidden is shown below left. The stacked layers are shown below center, with the areas tinted blue being transparent.

Middle Layer Erased	Stacked Layers	Final Image

The final image above on the right is created by showing all three layers. When sharpening the image, the top and bottom layers should be sharpened, but not the middle layer.