Lightroom Radial Filter

Lightroom Hidden Gem series

Lightroom is probably the best program for managing and organizing images. Lightroom also has many hidden gems and in this article I am going to look at the usefulness of the RADIAL FILTER for selective adjustments.

You may have used the Radial Filter to adjust the exposure or add some effects to your photos like in these examples:

 

 

Did you know that you can use the Radial Filter in Lightroom to create a shallow depth of field?

One of the most used cameras in the world is probably the iPhone. One of the main short comings of all smart phones, as well as point and shoot cameras, is they cannot provide a shallow depth of field to make our main subject more pronounced. In most of the workshops I teach I don’t have time to use my real camera, so I take photos with my iPhone. When I go biking I’d rather travel light and not carry heavy cameras and lenses. These are the times I wish my iPhone could make the background pleasingly blurred.

Thanks to Lightroom’s Radial Filter, now I can create a shallow depth of field effect in my images. Here are examples from one of my biking trips.

 

 

And here are some examples from my workshop images.

 

 

As you can see, by adding a radial filter and reducing the Sharpness to -100% and adjusting the Clarity a shallow depth of field effect is possible.

 

Do you want to learn more about Lightroom techniques?

Our next Lightroom workshop is scheduled for September 15, 2014. Plan to join us where you will learn more about these hidden gems!

 

Ted and the Omnilargess Team

[SINGLEEVENT single_event_id=”lightroom-editing-techniques-2-53728bc98f92c”]