Creating a Shallow Depth Of Field in Photoshop

In today’s episode we’re going to be editing an image taken by Angela of the Phlearn team. The photo is of her friend’s son Sam Stairs. In this super crisp and focused picture of Sam by the water, we’re going to be working backwards. We’re going to simulate a shallow depth of field in Photoshop.

Of course this is much easier to do if you shot it with a shallow DOF initially, but for when you don’t — there’s Photoshop! This is helpful because with a shallow DOF especially in a picture like this, it helps bring the viewers eye to the main focus, which would be the subject. We do this (in post) by utilizing selections, as well as all of the different types of blurs that Photoshop has to offer. One of the best blurs for this kind of image would be the Tilt-shift blur in Photoshop CS6, but we understand not everyone is working on CS6 so we show you how to do the same thing in CS4 and CS5 as well.