Strolling Home: Refining Focus

If this is your first visit here, please read the preamble. I'm always looking for constructive feedback on post-processing techniques so I can craft better photographs.

---

Last week the family took a walk around the neighborhood. I took the camera - trying to make this habit and not afterthought. On the walk home, my wife and son were ahead of me and I took this photograph:

Strolling Home

At the moment of the shot, my feelings were of relaxed simplicity - taking a walk with someone important in your life. An easy-going gait. Nothing complicated. I liked the leading lines of the grass and sidewalk, and the repetition of the trees, drawing the eye toward my subjects walking casually into the distance. But I'd shot in aperture priority at F8, so there was too much depth of field which I found distracting.

Enter Serendipity.

About half a day before getting to the processing of this shot, I happened to watch a few tutorial videos on OnOne's FocalPoint tool. Very powerful, loads of effects mimicking a variety of cameras, but the core essence is blurring portions of the photograph. I'm not ready to buy OnOne (ok...that's code for I can't afford it now), but what I can do is use the same basic technique with the tools I do have. Aperture has a Blur adjustment - as does just about all other tools these days.

I wanted all the surrounding detail (aka distractions) softened - in particular the trees in the foreground -so the eye is more naturally drawn to my walking subjects. I applied a blur to the entire image, then selectively erased the adjustment from my subjects using a brush with a lot of softness at the edges. Also, doing so with several overlays to feather the blurring effect. The mask of the blur effect looks like this:

Blur effect, drawing focus to the subjects

Voila. Looking at this as I post it, I could stand to do a bit more feathering of the blur removal on the left edge. But generally, I'm happy with this.

And for the record, I did a little cloning in the grass area to hide a less than attractive drainage pipe. That was a major distraction for which blurring wouldn't have been sufficient.