Lost your bokeh??

In case your wondering what the heck I'm ranting on about, it's bokeh. Bokeh is derived from the Japanese boke or bokeru, it means blurred or fuzzy, and I'm refering to the photographic use, throwing backgrounds out of focus.

In practice theres two ways to do this, you can use a fast (ideally long) lens which because of it's narrow depth of field make the background blurry, or you can do it post process with digital, the basic way is to select your subject (here a jolly handsome chap if I say so myself) and use one of the blur options in Photoshop or your favorite processing software.

Now theres a better way, Alien Skin have produced a Bokeh plug-in for photoshop or paint shop pro, again you have to select your subject, but now you have a lot more options for the blur, and lots of presets, like the Canon 85mm F1.2, it's able to alter the specular highlights (if you have them) into various shapes as well.

Another feature is a vignette effect, and a sort of lensbaby effect (or Planer focus) although for me it's missing the aberations present in the true LB shots.

Heres a before and after shot using Alien Skins Bokeh, personally I think it does a much better job than the photoshop blur, it doesn't leave the halo PS tends to with gausine blur. The killer is the price, the best part of £200.

Wayne