How-to: blur a background

A bit of technique:  sometimes people remark that with an iPhone, you can’t get the depth of field effects that you can using aperature priority with a DLSR.  Well, you can.  Sort of, using post-processing.  There are also camera apps that do similar things, but here is an example of how I cleaned up a snapshot to make it look like an aperature-priority photo.

The simple snapshot had a person in the background right over the subject’s shoulder, which was distracting and spoiled the shot, so I cropped it, and then used PaintFX to selectively blur the background.  I used a stylus to only touch the areas to be blurred.  Then, because color photos often look characterless to me, I used a split-tone filter, which also makes the blurring look more natural.

Before:

 

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After:

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