You know the kind of technique used where, within the photo, the subjects stand out from the background and everything else is blurred? You may see an insect sitting on a flower that is in focus and everything around it is out of focus. This is a standard trick of the trade that is called selective focus. One method of doing this is to control depth of field from within the camera by using a large aperture lens to produce a narrow depth of field.
Another method is to manipulate the image by hand using an image editing program such as Photoshop and blur everything in the background. That can take time and some skill to get it to look good without looking manipulated. Or at least it was difficult until onOne Software came out with FocalPoint.
FocalPoint gives you the ability to use selective focus to remove distracting backgrounds and allows you to force the viewer's line of sight directly onto the subject. While this is popular in macro photography, it is also very popular in portrait, wedding, commercial, and editorial photography as well. Now with FocalPoint 2, you have even more options and control.
What is needed to run FocalPoint?
• Windows (XP SP2, Vista, or later), or Mac (OS X 10.5, 10.6)
• 1 GHz Pentium 4 or equivalent (Windows), PowerPC G5 1 GHz or Intel core processor (Mac)
• 1 GB RAM (2 GB recommended)
• Required host of Adobe Photoshop CS2, CS3, or CS4, or Photoshop Elements 4 (on Mac) or Elements 5 (on PC) or later.
• Optional host application of Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 or 8
• 100 MB free hard disk space
• OpenGL 1.5 video card
• Adobe Flash Player 9 for tutorial movies
• Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 or higher on PC
So what is new with FocalPoint 2.0?
• Multiple FocusBugs gives you the ability to define more areas to keep in focus. You can combine multiple FocusBugs to create complex shapes or highlight multiple subjects.
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Article comments
1 - Pelle Piano
I like this filter though it seems to have a bug and some shortcomings.
The bug being that there is no soft transition between a non blurred area and a blurred one, there is a sharp annoying "border". This remains, using focus bugs, selection or trying to brush it with feathering or whatever. ( the brush is painfully slow when having the image open, better with just the mask showing ).
I also would have welcomed a fetahring parameter for selections, its only avaiable for bugs and brush.
I chose between using the Lens Blur in Photoshop, which is actually very good, but has little control over "blooming" which is essential and it is to slow.
Bokeh from Alien skin had to little controls for my taste, and it could not make smooth transitions based on a selection ( often you want to make aselection fast in Photoshop first ( or be very exact, as it is faster to make masks in Photoshop ). It has a nice blooming feature that can really boost the highlight though.