Photos Taken: June 4, 2024
As you may know I’ve been using my iPhone as my primary camera, though I still use LightRoom to edit the pictures. Last week I stumbled across an opportunity to practice and demonstrate what can be done in Lightroom. As we walked back from our neighbor’s house I saw this rose and took two pictures of it with my iPhone. Here is the first picture; exported to JPG format from the phone (no cropping or other adjustments).
It’s a nice picture with beautiful color and detail – as we’ve come to expect from Apple. But everything is in focus which distracts us from the subject. I wanted to blur some of that background to bring more attention on that beautiful rose. Lightroom 7.3 – the latest version as of the time I write this – has a new feature called “Lens Blur” which examines the depth of the photo and allows you to blur the foreground or background. I made a quick attempt and ended up with this. I also adjusted tones and cropped a bit
Better (I think).
Then, last night I was watching a Brian Matiash YouTube video on using Adobe presets in conjunction with the Lens Blur tool. I used the Strong Adaptive Blur Background preset to see how it does.
Again, not too bad and pretty close to what I had already done. There is a problem is with the rose bud at the top of the frame: the stem looks a little fake. In fact it looks like the top part of the stem is floating. Less than ideal. (When my daughter-in-law is helping her daughter when she’s fussy, DIL says “I know baby; less than ideal.” I’ve adopted that phrase.) I imagine using a different preset or adjusting the strength of the preset would help.
I then took a second approach to the scene. iPhones have a “Portrait” mode which blurs all the non-subject parts of the photo.Here is that picture exported out of the iPhone as a JPG without any editing beforehand.
Wow; it really does a great job of identifying the flower and its stem while blurring everything else. To see if I could get a similar effect in Lightroom I went back to the original iPhone picture (the first pic in the post with all the detail) to make another set of edits. In addition to just using the Lens Blur tool to calculate the depth and determining how much of the background to blur, I used the associated refinement brush to add more blur. This enabled me to blur the leaves close-ish to the flower instead of only relying on their place in the foreground/background.
I think this version helps focus on the flower.
Please leave a comment to let me know what you think.
If you are interested in using Lightroom I highly recommend Brian Matiash [I am not an affiliate] for his YouTube videos and his courses. When I switched from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom I used his course “Lightroom Everywhere” which shows how to sync your photos and edits on your desktop and mobile devices (tablet and/or phone).
