Make a great Bokeh effect

Create out-of-focus highlights from scratch with a little help from CS6’s new time-saving shortcuts

01 Make a circle
Make a new document (File>New) and fill it with black. Create a new layer, then grab the Elliptical Marquee tool, hold down Shift and drag a circular selection. Go to Select>Modify> Feather. Set Radius 10px and then hit OK. Choose a bright foreground colour then hit Alt+Backspace to fill the circle.

02 Make quick copies
Grab the Move tool and check ‘Show Transform Controls’. Hold Alt and drag the circle to make a copy. Repeatedly Alt-drag the circles around to make more copies while varying colour and size. Press Cmd/Ctrl+U and adjust the Hue slider to change colours. Hold Shift and drag the corner of the bounding box to resize.

03 Add variety
For more variation, highlight different layers and hit 1-9 to quickly set a layer Opacity between 10-90%. Also, go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur, set Radius 10px and hit OK. Hit Cmd/Ctrl+F to repeat the blur effect on other circles.

04 Group and dupe
Shift-click from top to bottom to highlight all the circle layers then choose Blend Mode: Linear Dodge (Add). Press Cmd/Ctrl+G to group the layers together, then hit
Cmd/Ctrl+J to duplicate the group. Grab the Move tool, click the bounding box, then position and resize the new group. You can make further copies to build up the effect.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 17th, 2012 at 9:56 am and is filed under Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a comment. Pinging is currently not allowed.