Digital Scrapbook Pro

I love the LensBaby Set of Creative Lens for The Canon or Nikon - Someday I want to purchase one, but in the meantime  I wanted to simulate the effect in photoshop without the cost of the lens kit.

You can look at this Flickr Group for some ideas as to what the LensBaby is capabile of. There are thousands of examples and more added daily.

This effect can take a normal good photo and add alot of impact to it. For Example  here is the Before and after of a photo that I took of an accident (I was not involved - Just happened in my rear view mirror and I stopped to call 911)

Before the Lensbaby Lens Treatment

After the Lensbabies Treatment
As you can see it takes a normal photo and add drama and life to the photo. The photo without the lensbaby effect is pretty boring. But afterwards the photo is much more dramatic and in my humble opinion is a much better photo.

Now on to how I did this in Photoshop CS4.

1) Open Photo in Photoshop and Duplicate the layer (Right click on layer and click on Duplicate background layer)

2) Give yourself some room to work - Increase the canvas size by 125%  (Main Menu - Image - Canvas Size)

3) Add the Blurs - I do two different blurs to get this effect - This is Personal Preference and depends on what photo you are working on. - I suggest you study some of the photos from flickr to see what the lensbaby does and put that to use here. For this photo I used a gaussian blur (3.3 Radius Note The Ammount depends of the size of the image More for larger images The Image I was working on is onl 1024 Pixels wide) then I applied Motion Blur (Angle 27 and a Distance of 64 Pixels) Again this depends on the size of the image you are working on. And is your peronal preference.

4) Add a layer mask to the duplicate layer (Main Menu - Layer - Layer Mask - Reveal All)

5) Select the Gradient tool (Press G on keyboard) Set Color to Black Foreground White Background - and Radial Gradient.

6) Using the Radial Gradient tool (You may have to play around a few times to get it to look right) Select a center point and make a circle around the area you want in focus - and since we used black to white it fades from Sharp focus to the blurs.

7) Crop the photo to get rid of the extra border we added earlier and or crop it to make it have a better use of the rules of thirds.

Thanks - DigitalAlan

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