Adding Fun and Useful Effects - Photoshop Elements 13: The Missing Manual - page 693

▪ Noise . The Lens Blur filter creates a perfectly smooth effect wherever you apply it. In or-
der to make the blurred area match the rest of your image, you'll probably want to add a
little bit of noise back into the filtered area. The controls in this section are the same as
those for the Add Noise filter you read about on Adding Noise: Smoothing Out Repair
Jobs .
While it's possible to get a nice blur with this filter, it's still not going to make a shot from
your cellphone fool people into thinking you were using a DSLR with a top-quality lens. So
don't feel bad if you prefer the simplicity of using the Gaussian Blur filter.
NOTE
In addition to all the blurs discussed here, Elements gives you three other ways to blur
photos, all found in Guided Edit→Photo Effects. The first is the Zoom Burst Effect,
which is something like a radial blur (see below) with the selected area kept in focus.
Adobe describes the effect as similar to what you'd get by zooming your lens with the
shutter open. (If you're familiar with the effects you can create in-camera by using a
Lensbaby lens, this is very similar.) You may want to give this one a try before using the
Radial Blur filter, described next. Another is the Orton Effect, named after the photo-
grapher who popularized this otherworldly, dreamy effect; if you've looked at any wed-
ding photos recently, you'll recognize it. The third is the Tilt-Shift effect, which uses blurs
to make your photos of full-sized objects look like pictures of miniatures.
Radial Blur: Producing a Sense of Motion
As you can see in Figure 13-10 , the Radial Blur filter creates a sense of motion. It has two
styles: Zoom, which is designed to create the effect of a camera zooming in, and Spin, which
produces a circular effect around a center point you designate, as in Figure 13-10 .