Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Dabbling in Motion Blur


I followed this Photoshop Essentials tutorial on how to make a photo look like the Bourne Ultimatum movie poster.

Here's a copy of the movie poster with Matt Damon to show what the effect looks like:





The technique uses a motion blur filter on everything except the subject. Also, the image is colorized, and a noise layer is blended in to give a slightly gritty look.

It can be rather time consuming to get this effect because the subject is masked twice. Once to add blur to the background and again to change the color of selected areas.

At first I didn't think the photoshopped images looked like they were in motion. But after staring at the a blurred image for a few seconds and then back to the original, the original looks surprisingly stationary.

Purposely adding blur and grain to images is a new experience for me. As a beginning photographer, those are the types of things I usually try to avoid. These first exercises in motion blur aren't exactly dazzling, but they have opened up a new realm of possibilities for me.

It is exciting to see what can be done with motion blur. Smashing Magazine shows 45 beautiful examples to amaze and inspire you.

5 comments:

betchai said...

wow, i did not know you can do that in Photoshop Diane, thanks a lot for the info. I thought they did it by panning, i tried panning many times, but in my 100 shots, maybe I only get 1 good one :(

now, i will try to experiment on this too.

betchai said...

you are right, the bikers looked in motion and the first one stationary, thanks for sharing Diane.

penny said...

Very creative of you to try this wonderful lesson and they turned out great!

•°°• IcyBC •°°• said...

I love to play with Photoshop also, but like you said, it's very time consuming!

I like this moving motion, and the turtle looks like he's running..

SandyCarlson said...

These are really neat effects. Thanks for explaining what you did. I enjoyed learning.