How Photoshop Can Simulate Depth of Field or Santa Claus Needs a Vacation

How it works: Photoshop 7 tutorial simulates the depth of field effect so Santa looks natural in this beach scene. Depth of field is a visual effect that is peculiar to a single lens reflex cameras where objects closest to a camera lens appear to be in sharp focus while objects at a distance appear blurred. The tools that we will be honing our Photoshop chops on are the layer masks, and layer duplication.

Step 01 - How I accomplished this effect is that first I had an image of a beach scene with some lounge chairs. Next I duplicated this layer by dragging the image to the “create a new layer” icon on the lower right of the layers palette. (this is good practice because it gives you an extra duplicate layer if you want to try a very complicated technique to ensure that you have a copy of the original file.)

Step 02 -I applied a Gaussian blur filter to this duplicated layer. A setting of 5 will usually do the trick. Next I added a layer mask to this particular layer. Layer mask are one my most favorite tools. With layer mask, if you use a brush or a gradient tool, the darker image will allow the image in the layer below to show through while the lighter image will allow the top layer to appear. If you use the gradient tool, the mask will blend in a smooth manner. So the grey area will show both top and bottom layer depending on the darkest. If you apply it onto the blurred layer it will give you the illusion that foreground is sharp and the background will become blurry as you recede further into the vanishing point.

Step 03 -Next I found an image of Santa Claus. I used the lasso tool to roughly select Santa. I copied this image and then pasted it onto the beach scene. I usually press CTRL-T (Command-T for the Mac), which allows me to scale, distort or rotate. After I adjusted the position and the size, I pressed the enter key to commit the change. Again, I use our friend the layer mask. I used the brush tool to brush out the background. This is called non-destructive editing meaning my changes do not destroy the image. You can go back and forth until you have the silhouette exactly the way that you want it. Now, Santa is on his favorite lounge chair on the islands!

Step 04 -The crowning touch is to add the text, which gives it that postcard look. I used Caflisch script. Ordinarily in previous versions of Photoshop, you don’t actually know what the typeface look like. If you're so fortunate to have the most recent, Photoshop CS3 version, you're able to get a sampling of the type on the right hand side of the menu. I chose Caflisch script because it feels like a script that would go nicely with Santa in the islands!

I hope you enjoyed this special tutorial. If you want to play with the source file, you can right click on this: Depth of field source file