: Creating a perfect background blur? I have looking through DeviantArt and the background of one of the web interfaces caught my eye. I tried to replicate it but couldn't get anywhere near

@Bryan765

It looks like nothing more than a gaussian blur to me. Granted, the hand and phone have been masked and relocated to another layer (unaffected by the blur), so it can remain in focus.

Cutting out (masking) your subject and blurring out the background is one of the most common (and simplest) techniques in mixed creative design.

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@Ravi4787994

There's really nothing special there. A plain ol' gaussian blur could give you the same affect. Sometimes adding a little grain to the image will help to obscur the fake quality of the focus.

What exactly do you feel like you're not getting in comparison?

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@Vandalay110

Consider that the foreground item (the hand) is masked and floating on a blurred image of the landscape.

If you had an similar image without the blur, you could make a duplicate layer and add a layer mask such that only the hand is visible. The bottom layer, blur the heck out of it.

You might have to enlarge the top layer slightly to cover for any "bleed-over" from the hand in the bottom blurred area.

It is also possible in some photoshop filters to use a mask or an alpha channel during the filtering process.

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@Pierce403

Photoshop - Lens blur worked for me. I took a clear landscape and just tweaked until I got a blur just like in the photo.

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