Hey you guys, its Gerry Button coming at you with another fantastic Pixelmator tutorial. I'm going to show you how to blur the background of an image. This tutorial comes as a request one of many from my YouTube user name keytux a.k.a. Steven. Dude, this tutorial is for you keep in mind that this is not very hard to do, I'm not questioning your skills of course but this is not very hard, so if your in for it, if you are hoping and advance tutorial within this it’s not very hard, it’s pretty easy just a few click, click, click, blur then you're done. Blur image maybe makes some black and white. Ready? Let's get started.
All right, when you go to do this type of tutorial or right or just do this automatic you go ahead on image you want that you want to edit already. So I'm not going to create a new canvas I'm just going to open in the existing image, so click the existing image and then you'll browse around for what photo you want. Since we use always 10 because this is the Pixelmator tutorial you can easy go down to your medial link down here on the bottom where you can fine your browser, click photos and then just navigate to where you want. The photo I want is within Eastern in Harbor Britain and make this a big a bit wider and so you can see more photos. I'm going to center it so it looks more statically nice.
And then I'm going to scroll down to the photo I want to use which is this one on of my wife in front of the ones by the lighthouse. You can't see the lighthouse because it is behind these trees. So, it’s a bit to big so get you remove tool V and then go to image size and let it down to—make the height about 700 and then just click ok. Now, I have a smaller image to work with. And now we got full zoom in, I did that by double clicking on the icon right here that will zoom right in full size. I'm going to make the canvas a bit smaller. I'm going to move to about right here.
Now, we don’t really need two options or do we? No, we actually yes, we do. Now what we going to do is going to call the base layer, base, hit ok. All right, now we’re going to blur what's behind Sharon, to do this we need a selection tool so hit L in your keyboard and then it will bring up the free hand lasso. Now if you want more precise looking curve over here what you can do is you can hit it again and you get the polygon lasso.
You can hit command 2 on your keyboard to bring up the tool options and you can switch here if you want. Let's that command to command 2, I did brings it up simple, so I'm going to use the free hand lasso with the multiple selection box here, selected. This will allow me to add selections later if I'm not please with what I create then just hide it out and make a selection around the object you want to do or I mean the object your want to make more focus.
Now, I made the selection around Sharon it’s not very hard you just click with the mouse drag around and let go when you want to make the selection. So this is the selection we add in rather and I'm going to go to edit, refine selection. Then with your feather make the feather had towards—bring it up depending on how much you think you might need. I want to go right up to about 70. You can bring in the size if you want or you can make it bigger, you can expand it better that’s about right there, actually make it a little bit smaller and then you can hit smooth but I find that doesn’t do much for me and then just click ok.
This is now feather the area image you selected, so I where to copy it you get a nice feather edge. Get your marking tool and then go to edit, inverse—I just use the marking tool for my own personal reasons you don’t need to if you don’t want to. Go to filter, blur—strange why isn’t it—oh, I don’t have a layers selected, sorry guys.
Go to base and go to filter, blur and then we’ll say zoom. And let see here, let say some use. Okay, we’re going to use just a base, just click it once to make it little blur and the right thing about the zoom blur is you can control the way it directions or at the direction in which it flows. So I'm going to move the selection—so you're going to increase it more if you want to see what way of selections moving. So we’re just move it—click other to go. That’s good right there drag it to the bottom so its looks like she's going upwards and then click ok and then go to filter, blur, Gaussian blur and then just hit it twice and then select away and there you have it, it looks like you blur the background behind the person or an object.
Now, one thing to keep in mind that this is not the exact way people do it there are much better ways much digital SLR cameras, auto focus certain things in the object and will blur the background behind it. Anyway, a good example is pretty much the macro shot. Another way you can refine the selection around your person is grabbing the blur tool which is right here. You can click R in the keyboard, you just click and you can go around the edges if your not satisfied with the original section—well, it does pretty much with the name it says it blurs whatever it touches and then there you have it.
It’s not very hard to blur at that, I mean like this. You know, I did it in few shorts steps and you’ve don’t it in few shorts steps. And there's a lot more you can do with this image after you blur the background. You can do saturated to make it black and white or you could cleverly have a tiny, tiny little monster that will surely come in shore and not destroys certain middle town.
Well guys, this is it for the tutorial I hope you might have learned some today. This is not really in advance tutorial it was done out of the kindness over request. He took the time to ask me a question and ask for help so I responded. I hope he learned something from this. Once again I'm not really showing you the exact ways to its’ done just a few ways you can get the barrow link.
Guys, thanks for watching—because I know this question will be ask once, twice maybe three or four times I'm going to answer it right here now with the aim of the video to see how many people actually watch. The wallpaper is from a web blog called turn spot and the docs is from the deviantart. It’s up to you with find those two resources. I have not a provider of wallpapers, docs and icons. I'm may provide is only for tutorials and maybe in a future stock photos. But, I'm not sure about that yet. Well, I know for fact I'll be giving that renders too. Thank you for watching guys.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services