Photoshop Blur Tool Tutorial

Video Transcript

"Adobe Photoshop is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated, and I am in no way affiliated with Adobe. All right, we're going to be talking about the blur tool on this clip. In Photoshop CS3 and the prior Photoshops, they have given us something called the blur tool, as you can see right over here. There's an R next to that, meaning that that is the shortcut. So if you hit shift R, you can scroll through all the different ones, but the little drop is the blur tool. This kind of works like with the--this kind of works with the brush tool in the sense that you have all the options as the brush tool. You can make it softer or harder, whatever you like. Also, you have the mode tool, where you can darken, lighten, and change the hue and saturation. And you also have the strength mode. So for this tutorial I'm going to kind of show you how the blur tool works a little bit. Say for instance on this photograph that I took, you can--say for instance the hand is maybe a little distracting to some people and you just want to focus on the eyes and the glasses, you can use the blur tool to kind of give you that depth of field kind of look you get out of a shallow depth of field on your F stops on your camera. You can do this in-camera or you can do this in Photoshop. So what you do is you just basically click and drag over whatever you want to be blurry, and it slowly makes things a little bit softer and more out of focus than what it normally is. And the way we can actually really tell if this worked or not is you can go over to the history and actually click the very first original, and as you can see, the hairs on his hand actually got a lot blurrier. As you can see when we click that, it just totally blurs everything. And if I click back, you can see, it just comes back into focus. So the blur tool is just one way of getting stuff out of focus in Photoshop, and you can keep clicking all you want and get it more blurry, and blurry, and blurry. But this is kind of a neat way to single out one single section of your picture and make that single section blurry."