From the course: Photoshop for Designers: Filters

Compare Motion Blur and Path Blur - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop for Designers: Filters

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Compare Motion Blur and Path Blur

- [Nigel French] In this movie, I'm going to show you two different ways, to add a motion blur to an image. Here's our starting image, it already has some motion blur on it, I would just like to add more to the go-kart. So, as always, I will come to the background layer, and convert this to a smart object. (inhales) Now we have two options. We have, from the filter menu, blur, we have the old favorite, motion blur, and then from the blur gallery, we have path blur. Let's start out with motion blur. I want to match the angle, as best I can, to the angle of the vehicle, and then I just, use the slider to determine the distance. The thing about motion blur, is that the blur is going to be centered, it's going to occur either side of the subject. I'll click OK, and now just to restore some of the image, I'm going to come to my gradient tool, I want to make sure that I am, using this option foregrounds to transparent, and that black is my foreground color. I'll come to my smart filter mask, and then swipe over the subject with my gradient tool, leaving just the blur towards the back of the vehicle. And, if necessary I'll just undo, so that I can have another go at that. And we can also double click on the filter mask, and reduce it's density. I may then want to switch to my brush tool, and paint back in some of the detail, like on the face and the hands. I'll make sure that I am in black as my foreground color, and then I'll just paint back over the face, and the hands and the steering wheel. Okay, so that is a motion blur. Let's now make a duplicate of this layer, command or ctrl J. I will discard the motion blur filter, and this time, I'm going to come to my blur gallery, and choose path blur. With path blur we have to draw the direction of the path. Now I want, the blur to go behind the go-kart, So I'm going to spin this around, and I'm also going to manipulate this path, to sort of follow the line of the go-kart. A potential advantage of this approach, is that this blur does not need to be centered. So I'm going to uncheck that option, so that I just push the blur behind the go-kart. I'll increase the speed, let's go to 75%, and then click on this end point, and I am going to increase the end point speed. Let's go to about 175 there. Once again, I'll click OK, and I would restore portions of the image, in the same way as I just did on the previous example, by adding paint to the smart filter mask. In fact, what I'm going to do here, is copy this smart filter mask, I'll hold down option or alt, and drag it unto the filter mask, of the blur gallery layer, and there we see it applied. So that's the difference between a path blur, which we are currently looking at, and a motion blur, and the path blur makes it easier, to have the motion blur on just one side of your subject.

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