Alien Skin - Bokeh
Finally, you can manipulate focus just like fast expensive lenses with Bokeh, Alien Skin’s latest
Photoshop plug-in. Bokeh is the only software that accurately simulates the distinctive blurring
and creamy highlights of real lenses. Presets were made from careful experiments with lenses
famous for their bokeh highlights, such as the Canon EF 85mm f/1.2 II and the Nikon 105mm f/2.8
Macro. You can get creative with full control of a radial or planar sweet spot, just like expensive
tilt-shift lenses. Vignetting can help frame a portrait or give that Lomo look. Bokeh is so flexible
that it can even render heart-shaped highlights!
Whilst we are waiting on the cd with the software I downloaded a version from the website and start working looking at Bokeh. We have a photo competition from the professional photography course of the institute and I wanted to brush-up one of my photos for this.
The image on the left is taken at Alnwick food festival and as you can see a reasonal image but it would be much better if the man was standing more out from the back-ground as he blend in at the moment. This is what Bokeh is all about.
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 if you hover your cursor over the images you see the result and I hope you agree that it has improved the image a lot.
We will do some video work of our own to show how easy the software works and what great results you can get.
Our first conclusion of the software, more then your money worth
The team