Artificial DOF - Does This Look Fake?

Look at most any magazine cover or most professional wedding photographs or other portraits. Typically it is best to keep the background out of focus as much as possible, focusing the attention more onto the subject.

Sure there are examples of keeping basically everything in focus, but for most people there is too much distraction away from the main subject.

Can be done with focus, aperture, and/or exposure

One of many, many examples is this Vogue cover

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2292454/Taylor-Swift-named-worst-se...

But this thread isn't about how to do this optically, most of us here know how. It's about whether faking it in post is effective and how well the OP has managed his 'fake dof'...

Back on the laptop now so here is the before and after, I modified the after to remove the graduated filter as some suggested

Before:



After:



I also had a very quick go on Topaz lens effects, this took about 5 mins building the depth map, it would take more time to get it right cos his ear is obviously at the wrong depth, but as a quick first go I'm quite impressed with lens effects.

Exactly, and I think it's come off ok.

As an aside, the graduated filter in lightroom works well for this, as you can approximate the amount of blur expected over the distance between front and back.
Lightroom CC added the graduated filter brush, which allows you to then paint back out the effect of the graduated filter from specific objects.
That's useful for not touching mountains for example, when you're darkening a sky, or for people, when you're applying a graduated blur to simulate depth of field.

You've done a fabulous job, i often add backgrounds to my photo's and have to blend edges, very time consuming!

The end result is very good and it doesn't matter if the DOF is 'real' or not. In any case, a camera lens renders DOF differently to the human eye, so you could argue that results straight from camera are fake anyway!

The important thing is whether you and your family like the image, which I think you do.

Regards
David

If what the camera (lens optics) sees is fake, then so is all ocular vision as what we see is only in our heads.
IOW: Neither are fake according to the system which translates the light waves into an image.