Home | Forums | Article Search | Subscribe & Shop | Contact Us | Log Out Alien Skin Bokeh Email This Print This View My Personal Library Loading Zone July 2009 • Vol.9 Issue 7 Page(s) 80 in print issue Add To My Personal Library Alien Skin Bokeh Bokeh $199 Alien Skin www.alienskin.com CPUs: 4 One of the main differences between an amateur photographer and a pro is that the latter has the equipment and expertise needed to make photos really pop by using an extremely shallow depth of field. If you’ve ever seen a picture where objects in the foreground are in sharp focus while the background is a dreamy haze, you’ve seen this trick, called bokeh, in action. The two main problems with achieving pro-quality shots that use this technique is that it requires expensive lenses, and you must get your depth-of-field setting just right when the actual photo is taken. Neither of these is viable for amateurs (or even pros on a budget), but that’s where Alien Skin’s Bokeh comes in. This plugin simulates a wide variety of real-life lenses to let you load any picture into a supported photo editor, apply the focus precisely where you want it, and blur the background in a variety of ways. It works best if you are already good at masking foreground objects from background objects (or have another tool to do so), but is even useful for raw beginners who just want to highlight faces for professional-looking portrait shots. We tested it in Photoshop CS4 (provided courtesy of Adobe) and found it to be very stable and easy enough to use that we were manipulating shots in interesting ways within minutes. The interface is dominated by a large preview window on the right-hand side that responds quickly to adjustments made from a tabbed pane on the left-hand side. A Settings tab provides access to a variety of preset blur types, with each type subdivided into settings for various real-world commercial lenses, along with generic lens types, such as Hollow Heart and Hollow Star. Once the main blur type is established, you can move on to the Bokeh tab for fine-tuning settings such as Creaminess (which adjusts how highlights appear within the blur), the simulated camera diaphragm shape you wish to use, and whether you want to use a radial or planar focus region, among others. All said, Bokeh is easy to grasp, highly responsive, and, in the hands of someone who knows her way around a photo editor, can help quickly achieve results that would otherwise require a lot of tedious work. Highly recommended, and a demo along with video tutorials are available at the Alien Skin Web site. by Tracy Baker  User Reviews Be the first to write a review of this product Want more information about a topic you found of interest while reading this article? Type a word or phrase that identifies the topic and click "Search" to find relevant articles from within our editorial database. Enter A Subject (key words or a phrase): ALL Words (‘digital’ AND ‘photography’) ANY Words (‘digital’ OR ‘photography’) Exact Match ('digital photography'- all words MUST appear together) Home      Copyright & Legal Information      Privacy Policy      Site Map      Contact Us Copyright © 2010 Sandhills Publishing Company U.S.A. All rights reserved.