Artificial DOF - Does This Look Fake?

It was my sons first day at school today, I took a few pictures of him with his pristine school uniform before it is glued and painted etc. Due to the excitement, rush, emotional wife etc, the best smile I got was when he was positioned in front of the car across the road, making the background more distracting than I'd like. Also I'd not has time to swap lens so was using the 18-135 at F8 so DOF was quite wide. So this evening I set to work with topaz remask and photoshop to try and soften the background. I made a layer with my son cut out, and another layer with my son cut out of the background, I then used a Gaussian blur on the background, but found that the transparency from the cut out affected the blur, so I had to fill the background by cloning the edges into the transparent area. Having spent the best part of an hour doing all this, its obvious to me what I've done and I think it looks a bit cardboard cutout (not helped by the fact he was a bit backlit)

My question is, looking at this without seeing the original, or knowing where all the seems are, does it look un-natural?

The backlighting does make him stand out slightly but that would be the case anyway with a similar "real" image
He's a nice, happy looking fellow and his mum, gran and aunties are going to drool over it so why worry?
Nice bit of PP

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Looks good to me.

I've done similar work with portraits in the past using photoshop, but would probably use lightroom nowadays. Sometimes it's safer to shoot with a wider depth of field anyway, to cover any focus problems, especially if you have a group of people who may be a different depths. I typically use a brush to apply some reduced contrast and clarity and even some reduced sharpening to achieve this.

You've done a good job with this, and I suspect it's looking a bit fake to you because you can see the original, whereas we have no point of reference for comparison. Looks ok to me

There's a lovely local lady who does a great job fostering and rehoming cats, kittens, puppies and dogs. She's also a bit of photographer but can't quite get the hang of the shallow dof thing, so she fakes it with software (she says).

I think you're effort is quite safe from detection

It looks fake. It's because there's a section of the ground (the closest part) which is less blurred than it should be & because the blur's also just too smooth.

Compared to other efforts I've seen it is very good though, well done. Blur that section of the ground and it will be 99% OK.

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I think you have done a really good job of it.

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Andrew

"I'm here because the whiskey is free" - Tyla

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Personally I think you've done a good job

A "before & after" would help to judge the success from a technical perspective

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LennyBloke

Well that rather depends on the depth of the focal plane. It may well be that some of the ground behind the boy would be almost in focus.
I think knowing that the OP faked it makes us look for evidence. I wonder if we saw the photo without being told would anyone say 'Looks fake' ??

I don't think I would have thought 'looks fake' without prior knowledge of what has been done. The tell-tale signs are often around things like hair and without a large version to scrutinise, I can't see a problem! Well done mcpie!

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Andy

Thanks for all the comments, as mentioned by davidwozere, Mum, Granny's etc. liked and didn't notice the photoshopping.


I forgot to say in the steps I did in photoshop, there is the original background layer too. and I used a graduated filter mask to try and simulate that focal plane fading out, I've got it saved in PSD, so I'll try removing/moving the filter to see if it looks better. I messed for a while with the amount of blur and settled on the amount because of the red tail lights behind his head, with less blur they were still fairly distinctive red blobs.


,

I do intend to post a before/after later when I'm on my laptop. I wanted to post it without first to see if people thought the photoshopping was too obvious.

He 'stands' out a bit but it's far from screaming 'I am fake' . Especially considering it's a family photo and not a competition submission
If you're using Topaz, might want to download their Lens Effects trial. I haven't used it personally but according to the description on their site, it's meant exactly for that purpose.

And lastly, maybe it's just me, but not all portraits need a shallow DoF. He's a lovely boy with a cute smile. You'd need much more than a house and some trees to distract from that. Sometimes, capturing the moment is way more important than perfect technique.

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'Photography...it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten....' (Aaron Siskind)

I agree that you've done a very good job .. The OOF background and the borderline around the subject are managed well technically and only the experienced pixel-peeper would find anything.

I applaud you for doing so well with Topaz Remask, which I have to admit has tested my patience beyond its limits, and I enjoy computer editing generally! It would be interesting to see how the new 'lens effects' package deals with the masking issues, which I found very difficult in ReMask. So much so I can't see myself ever bothering with it again.

You'll have to go onto YouTube and give the world a ReMask Low DOF video tutorial ! Just get yourself a baseball cap for it or people won't take you seriously

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I could tell it's fake but I don't think man on the street would be able to. The reason I can tell is because the blurring isn't as gradual as I'd expect it to be, it's almost a "wall" of OOF that seems to start at a specific plain and then remains the same everywhere beyond that plain. I agree with Jonathan-mac, just blur the rest and it'd be virtually undetectable.

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... just another middle-aged guy with a hobby. I have an extreme macro learning site at extreme-macro.co.uk - Pentax-centric, your feedback and comments would be appreciated!

Thanks, I remember an email from them adversing it, I'll definitely give the trial ago, then wait til its on offer (Topaz usually have very good Cyber Monday offers)

Nigel, I find the latest versions of Remask very good, but it is made a whole lot easier with a touchscreen. I drew a fairly thin compute line around my son with pen on the screen, its much easier to be accurate drawing it on rather than using the mouse or trackpad, hence I'm able to use a thinner compute line and more accurate keep and discard areas. I guess this gives remask less leeway for error in its mask computations.

Not a bad job at all - I would graduated the blur on the ground a bit more gradually. I use this technique some of my own pics occasionally.

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