With photo-editing programs like Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom, creating beautiful bokeh effects in post-production is as easy as applying the Field Blur tool. “You want to determine what to focus on in the frame yourself instead of letting the camera choose,” says photographer Khara Plicanic. And turn off your autofocus point selection. Try focusing on different parts of your subject, snapping pictures, and seeing how everything comes out. Try taking shots of your subject from different distances, and with the subject at varying distances from their surroundings, to see how it changes the bokeh your lens produces.įocus: What you choose as your focal point will alter the focal plane. Positioning: Proximity of your camera to your subject and of your subject to their background will all affect bokeh. Experiment with those f-stops and see what you come up with. Experiment with f-stops in relation to shutter speed to see how your bokeh shifts and changes.Īperture: The main mover and shaker for bokeh is going to be the depth of field you create with your aperture settings.
As you open up the aperture of your camera, you can increase the shutter speed to get crisper images. It’s measured in seconds, so a fast shutter speed might be 1/1,000 of a second versus a slow speed of a second. Shutter speed: Shutter speed determines how long the shutter on your camera remains open to allow light to hit the film in your camera, or its digital sensor.
#Bokeh video background how to#
How shutter speed, aperture, and positioning affect bokeh.įor your experimentation, start with a well-lit, static object, like a bowl of fruit, and take trial shots to help you figure out how to create the bokeh you want to see: If more bokeh is your aim, consider a lens focal length of 70mm and higher. Longer focal lengths - whether in zoom or prime lenses - can help you maximize bokeh. For maximum bokeh, you want lenses that have the ability to stop to 1.2 or 1.4. With smartphone chips such as Huawei’s Kirin 980 getting ever more capable, we may eventually see similar functionality make it into chat apps on mobile phones - including Skype’s.For creating beautiful images with high-quality bokeh, you’ll want lenses that have low f-stops. But even if that number has dwindled by 30 percent in the intervening years, Skype is still a sizable force in online peer-to-peer (P2P) communications. Microsoft no longer reveals its active user numbers, though as of 2016 Skype claimed 300 million monthly users. Still, it’s notable to see background blur finally make it into a mass-market, real-time video product that doesn’t require any kind of hardware beyond a laptop. With the advent of video calls across messaging apps, including WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, Skype isn’t the force it once was. Skype parent company Microsoft actually included the same feature in its enterprise-focused Teams product last year, while Logitech’s Brio webcam has a similar feature baked into the camera’s settings app.
It’s worth noting here that this is not an entirely new thing in video call software. But this type of technology is never 100 percent perfect, and edge detection - the boundary between the human and their background - may be impacted by a number of environmental factors, such as lighting. Similar to Huawei’s camera app, Skype uses AI to detect human forms, including hair, hands, and arms, and ensure these attributes remain clear and in focus.