How to Use a Christmas Bokeh Overlay in Photoshop

Tanya Goodall Smith

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Christmas Bokeh Tutorial

This time of year I like to take a Christmas themed photo of my kids just for fun. We got a real tree for the first time this year and it practically takes up our entire living room. I wanted to create a photo with some large colorful bokeh effects in the background from the tree lights, but since we’re in such a tight space I wasn’t able to get the depth of field I needed for such an effect.

“No problem,” I thought. “I’ll just take some separate photos of the lights and add them in Photoshop.” Of course, it would be a lot easier to just get this one right in camera but when I don’t have the right equipment, time or space to get the look I want, it’s nice to know I have resources available to fix it later.

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For the portraits, I used a Canon Speedlite mounted to my camera and bounced the light off the ceiling and wall behind me. This allowed me to have a darker background even though I was shooting during the day with a lot of ambient light. This was shot at ISO 100 with a Canon 85mm f/1.8 lens at f/1.8, 1/200 of a second. My flash was set at 1/2 power.

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After I finished with the portraits I turned off my flash and changed the focus on my lens to manual. I moved closer to the tree and shot the lights out of focus. I shot this at the exact same settings as the portraits, minus the flash.

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After processing my images in Lightroom with the SLR Lounge Lightroom Presets (I just used the standard import preset and adjusted the white balance) I opened both images in Photoshop. I set the bokeh layer to Linear Dodge. Then I added a layer mask and erased the effect from the face and body. Here’s how it looked:

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Next, I wanted to add a little more texture and warmth so I opened one of the foundation textures from the SLR Photoshop Paper Texture Collection in Photoshop. I used a frequency separation action to erase the texture from the face. To read a full tutorial on how to use textures in your images, check out my article from last week: HOW TO CREATE A TEXTURED STILL LIFE FINE ART PHOTOGRAPH.

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And here’s a look at the final image.

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Christmas Bokeh Conclusion

How would you use this technique? Please leave a link in the comments. I’d like to see what you come up with.

CREDITS: All photographs by Tanya Smith are copyrighted and have been used with permission for SLR Lounge. Do not copy, modify or re-post this article or images without express permission from SLR Lounge and the artist.