Lightroom Presets – Focal Point with Blurry Backgrounds
A few weeks ago I released some Focal Point Lightroom presets that basically help you draw focus to one part of a photo by darkening other areas. Well, I was messing around with the presets the other day and realized that you could also do the same thing by blurring the background too (with negative clarity). When you add the darkening effect along with the blurred background you have a really cool way to draw attention to parts of your photos, while giving the background an softer effect.
If you haven’t seen the other presets, it’s worth checking them out and reading the post because you’ll get an idea of where they came from and how I created them. Just like last time, I’ve created 8 different presets that each use the Graduated Filter to take focus away from certain parts of the background. 4 of them are for Portraits (or portrait oriented images) and 4 of them are for landscape oriented photos (top left, top right, bottom left, and bottom right). Enjoy ‘em and let me know what you think!
Here’s the before/after:
Before
After
- Here’s the link to download the presets for Lightroom 4 (I made them for LR4. You can try them in LR3 but they’re tuned for LR4 specifically).
- And here’s a link to a video on how to install and organize Lightroom presets if you don’t know how.
Have a good one!