Fake a Soft Background

A favorite image editing trick, plus how to rename pictures easily.

The great thing about digital photography is that it allows you to fake all the techniques that are hard to do the old-fashioned way with film. Don't have any piano-playing sea lions handy? No problem--fake it digitally.

You can also use digital techniques for more down-to-earth photo tricks. Take depth of field, for instance. Portraits look best when the subject is in sharp focus and the background is blurry. But you have to plan that ahead of time by setting your camera to a large aperture setting before you take the picture. And many digital cameras tend to have a generous depth of field, which makes it hard to blur the background. Thankfully, it's easy to fake a blurry background afterwards on the PC. Take this image, for instance (really, take it and save it to your hard drive): back-cat1.jpg.

We're going to load it into Jasc Paint Shop Pro and blur the background. This adds more impact to the foreground, which should be the focus of attention.

The first order of business is a familiar one if you've been reading Digital Focus for a while. We need to isolate the subject by selecting it with a selection tool. My weapon of choice for this sort of picture is the Freehand Selection Tool in Edge Seeker mode. Select the Freehand tool from the fifth cubby in the toolbar on the left side of the screen. It's one of three tools that lives in that spot; so if it's not in evidence, click the down arrow to the right of the cubby and pick it from the list. Then choose the Edge Seeker Selection type from the Tool Options palette at the top of the screen. (If the Tool Options toolbar is hidden, tap F4 to call it up.)

After all that, you're ready to select the subject. Click on an edge, starting perhaps on his shoulder. Then continue clicking in short segments, working your way all around his body and the cat. When you get back to where you started, double-click to select the entire subject.

When you're done you should see a "halo" of selection dashes around the subject. Now let's duplicate the entire picture and make a second layer. That way, we'll be able to edit one layer without affecting the other. To do that, choose Layers, Duplicate from the menu. If the Layer Palette is open on the right side of your screen, you'll see that we just added a new layer. It's called, rather poetically, Copy of Background. (If you don't see the Layer Palette, choose View, Palettes, Layers from the menu.) You may want to double-click the Copy of Background layer in the palette and rename it to something more logical, like "Subject layer" and click OK to close the dialog box.

Now we're in business. Our next step is to eliminate the background from the top layer, leaving only the subject. Click the Subject layer in the Layer Palette to select it. Then choose Selections, Invert. Finally, press the Delete key. It's gone! How can you tell? Hover the mouse pointer over the Subject layer in the Layer Palette and you'll see a thumbnail image of the layer.

Now we're ready for the last step. Click the Background layer in the Layer Palette to switch to the bottom layer--the one that still has a background--and start blurring. Choose Adjust, Blur, Gaussian Blur and set the radius to 3.0, then click OK. Is it blurry enough for you? If not, apply it again. Notice that the subject stays razor sharp, since it's in the top layer, unaffected by the blur in the bottom. When you like what you see, save your picture. Here's how mine came out: back-cat2.jpg.

Peer into Ernest Hemingway's soul and you'll find morose, whisky-fueled nihilism, tinged with self-doubt and regret for the missed opportunities of youth. Peer into your computer's soul, and you'll find something almost as bad: hundreds of images with generic, automated names like DSC45001 and DSC45002. While there's not much we can do about Hemingway, we can help your computer. Cognitial Software's Name Dropper is a handy way to clear up all those anonymous, hard-to-identify digital pictures.

A friend recently told me about Name Dropper, and I've found it to be a cool way to rename digital pictures. Sure, you can batch rename in Windows or many image editors, but Name Dropper is better because it lets you assemble compound names just by clicking on preprogrammed buttons.

What do I mean? Suppose you have a bunch of vacation pictures--some from Disney World, others taken at the beach. Select the Disney snapshots in Name Dropper and click a button marked "Vacation-," then click a button marked "Disney." All the pictures will be named Vacation-Disney and numbered. Then choose the second set of images and click "Vacation-" followed by "Beach." You'll get a bunch of "Vacation-Beach" photos.

Name Dropper has a mercifully simple interface--to change any of the dozen buttons, just right-click and type. There are preset buttons for common terms like "&," "with," and "at." You can even see a preview of the selected picture so you know what you're renaming.

Name Dropper is a one-trick pony, to be sure. But it's amazingly good at what it does, which makes it worth its $20 price tag. Download it from Cognitial.com.

I'm almost ready to give up my digital camera. I liked the way my old point-and-shoot film camera would put the date at the bottom of each picture. Is there a digital camera or any software that will add dates to the picture for me?

--Roger Edwards, Fort Collins, Colorado

Don't do it, Roger! Sure, it's nice to have a date stamped directly on a picture sometimes--especially if it's evidence in a court case. But don't you agree that posting the date right on the picture is kind of ugly?

I think I have some good news for you. You may not be aware that all of the pictures captured by your digital camera include something called EXIF data. EXIF stores all sorts of stuff about the picture (the date and time it was taken, exposure information, and more) right along with the picture.

That data is visible in almost any image editor. In Paint Shop Pro, for example, you'd choose Image, Image Information. You can also find it in Windows: Right-click on a picture icon and choose Properties from the menu, then click the Summary tab and choose Advanced.

Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality, and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $15 and $50.

Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format, at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering, please read the full description of the contest rules and regulations.

This Week's Hot Pic: "Dewdrop Necklace," by Gilbert Vela, Santa Maria, California

Gilbert says that he took this picture early one foggy morning in March, when dew had collected on a rose bush outside his house. "The dew had formed droplets on the tips of the leaves," he says. "I used my Olympus C5050Z camera in its Super Macro mode to capture them."

Dave Johnson

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