Life after Photoshop

Bokeh

'Bokeh' is a Japanese word that describes the particular visual quality of out of focus areas on a picture. Bokeh fans will wax lyrical about the background rendering of certain lenses, while sceptics will wonder what all the fuss is about. It all depends on how sensitive you are to the nuances of images.

So although 'bokeh' is technically about how out-of-focus areas look, the word has been hijacked somewhat to mean anything that's out of focus – so there are image effect plug-ins like Analog Efex Pro, for example, that offer a 'bokeh' filter for making backgrounds blurred and concentrating attention on the main subject.

There's nothing wrong with that and it's a perfectly valid digital technique that can make a photo really effective. Really, it's a depth of field effect rather than 'bokeh', but the word seems to have stuck now so many people think it means the same thing.

Analog Efex Pro 2 review

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Verdict: 5 stars Analog Efex Pro2 goes way beyond most analog photography filters, offering not just film styles, grain effects and borders, but creative vignetting, bokeh, lens blur, lens distortion, double-exposures, motion blur and more.

How to get started with Analog Efex Pro

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Analog Efex Pro is one of the plug-ins in the Nik Collection. It works as a plug in with Lightroom Classic and Photoshop but it can also work as a standalone program or as an external editor with all sorts of other programs like Capture One, Exposure X and more. It’s designed to recreate the […]