How to fake realistic motion blur in Adobe Photoshop CC
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
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Hi there, in this video we're going to take the runner here, and make it look like he's moving nice and fast using Motion Blur. We'll also do it to this taxi here. Not zoom in, zoom in. All right, it's another Photoshop filter. Let's learn how to do it.
To get started let's open up a couple of files. It's 'Motion Blur 01' and 'Motion Blur 02'; Thanks, Hitesh. We're going to work on the runner first. To get started let's create two backgrounds, So let's right click the word 'Background', click 'Duplicate Layer'. This one's going to be called 'Runner'. And the bottom one here, double click the word 'Background', and name it 'Blur'. So add two of them. We need to work on these separately so let's turn the runner off, and let's blur the background first. Then we'll mask the runner. It's a nice easy filter we're going to learn.
Let's go to 'Filter', go down to 'Blur', there's one in there called 'Motion Blur'. If yours doesn't change, either preview's not on or you've still got the runner Eyeball turned on, because if that's on, it's kind of covering the work we're doing. So pick the direction, our runner's probably going to be running left to right. He can be running any which way you like. Maybe up, and turn right a little bit. No, he's running across. In terms of the distance, how streaky it gets, how fast you want this man to be running. It depends if you go in for, like exaggeration, or if you're going for just subtleness. I'm going for subtle, let's click 'OK'.
Let's turn the runner layer back on, and let's click on it. Now let's mask out the man, we're going to use the Quick Selection Tool. I'm using a brush of about-- what am I using? I'm going for 50. Clicking, holding and dragging across all the parts. It's pretty forgiving, because like in an earlier tutorial we're kind of replacing him back on his same background. So we can be pretty lax with the selection. You might disagree. You can get in there nice and zoomed in, and get it to be perfect. I'm going to zoom in. It's looking okay, looking okay, looking terrible, I'll grab his head. Grab his hand, the thumb, bits of hand. It was a bad one, undo. I might have to make my brush a lot smaller.
His skin tone is a lot, the same as the background. I'm going to hold down the 'Alt' key to minus from the selection, or 'Option' on a Mac. Same in here, I'm going to hold down the 'Option' key on my Mac, or 'Alt' on a PC. Just get rid of this stuff in the center here. Really small brush, minus '-' to get out. Hit that a bit back in. I'm just having a quick look. Now I'm doing the quick version of this. If this is going to be the front cover of your magazine you probably want to make your Layer Mask, then get into that Select and Mask that we looked in a previous tutorial to get it all looking perfect. It's not what we're doing today. Going quick. It's good enough for me. I'll zoom out.
So all we need to do now is make sure that runner layer is selected, click on 'Layer Mask'. And basically we're done. If you had a keen eye, what we should have done before we blurred this layer is we should have selected it, gone to 'Filter' and gone to 'Convert to Smart Filters'. It was a test, did you notice? I'm pretending it's a test, I just forgot. Let's click 'OK', the damage is done so I need to go back to the beginning, but I'm not but I converted it to a Smart Filter. Now I'm going to go to 'Filter; and go over the top of it again with 'Blur', 'Motion Blur', and crank it up some more.
Nice thing about that is, remember, you can turn that on and off. In your project, what I want you to do is, here in this '02' from Hitesh there's a mint looking taxi, I want you to do the exact same thing. So duplicate the layers, have the car layer and the blur layer, blur the Background Layer, mask out the car. Let's see if you can make it like it's going fast.
All right, everybody, that is a quick Motion Blur. Now we've gone through lots of different filters here. Eventually got to call quits on it because we could do 10 hours of just looking at filters. What I'm hoping you getting out of it is that you can see how to use them non destructively by using our Smart Object. And we can do fun things like Text and Masks. It's just one more we need to do before we go. It's a right of passage in Photoshop We'll do it in the next video.