Today, I’m going to show you how to do some cool blur effects for your sports photos. I created this collage using the EasyDigitals.com. Urban grunge set and one of my customers asked me, “How did you do this blur?” and so I wanted to show you how to do that today and we’re going to start with our original picture. The original picture had a background that was a little bit destructing because it was so unfocused and you could see the people behind watching the game. So I just wanted to make it a little bit blurred.

So the first thing I did was I pull up my picture and I made a duplicate. This is my background and I made a duplicate by dragging my layer on top of this little create a new layer box. So now, I have two, I’m going to call one—I’m just going to label this so I can keep track of them. I’m going to call one spin and I’m going to call the other one zoom. I also want to duplicate my background layer and just have an extra copy of that. It’s going to up here and I’m going to drag it up to the top and I’m going to turn it off.

From my spin background, I’m going to come up here and filter, blur and then I’m going to radio blur and I’m going to click on this little button that says, spin and let’s do it and try 10 and see outlooks. Okay, so that looks pretty good but I can still kind of make out what’s back here and that there’s people watching the game. So this would be okay or maybe you might want to make it a little bit more intense. I’m going to undo that and then I’m going to go back and I’m going to do filter, blur, radio blur and lets try a 17. Okay, that looks good to me. It’s kind of hard to make out what’s going on in the background so I like it better. Okay, now let’s come to this is only if you want to help do this zoom, blur as well. I’m going to come to my zoom while I’m working on this and I’m going to do filter, blur, radio blur and I’m going to come to zoom.

Now for this, you need a little bit more intense so I’m going to do—I’ve practice this earlier so I know that I like 64. This picture is a pretty high resolution so you need to play with this and get to how you wanted to look.

So, I have my zoom blur and I think that looks pretty good so now if I turn my background later on, you can see that I still have my regular photo and what I want to do with this is I want to turn it back on and add a mask. And this is your mask button and then I’m going to fill it with black so I’m going to switch this and I’ll put black on the top and then I’m going to do—make sure this is highlighted. I’m going to do Alt-backspace and it makes this black. So really, it's just basically hiding what you see here. Then you come over to your brush tool and you find a soft brush put it back on your picture and decide how big you want it to be and you just start brushing this with white. So you’re going to make sure the white is on top until your player starts coming in and you’re just going to brush around. And for his legs and the bat, I’m going to make it smaller. And I kind of like it a little bit of the blur being on him. Now, if you want it to make it a straight line, click it and then to shift and click and it would make a straight line blur.

So, I’m going to make this a little nit bigger and just –no, I’m going to start adding back in part my blur. So I turned it to black and then I just come around here and I come around to the parts where I think I took too much of it away, right in through here and then click my left bracket and make this smaller. And I’m just going to swap and I’m going to click there and then shift and click to where I think the end of the bat is. I saw how my shift click down and then I’m going to swap it and make this a little bit bigger and just spring a little bit of that back end shift because I want this to be really blurry around the back. And then if I—so now I have this mask and that is showing my player and then if I decide I want spin instead of zoom, I can just turn of the zoom and spin this behind it. So, that’s pretty easy and it's a good way to be able to make a different background without having to extract the image and do a lot of work with that. So I think it turns up pretty nice and it's a lot of fun.

The only next step that I would was I would crop this. Sometimes you want a little bit of space in front of your image, in front of the face of the player but I don’t want to crop out his back. Some I’m going to give about a quarter inch all around and a little bit of extra space in front of him and I’m just going to crop it and I’m pretty happy with that so hopefully you’ll enjoy using this. And you can show some of the techniques you do with it.