The Adamski Effect – A Simple Photoshop Technique

Some popular post-processing techniques are named after the person who created or popularized them.

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You may recall that we earlier published (refer to the article ‘Bokeh Panorama’, July 2018) a tutorial on a technique called the Brenizer Portraits that helps you to create the look of a photograph as it was taken with a super-fast wide-angle lens. Likewise, the Adamski Effect is a technique that adds blur (with the help of Photoshop’s filters) to the background of existing images without altering the subject. The most common blur type is the motion blur which creates a realistic motion effect in your images. However, other types of blurs can be used too.

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This technique needs precise selection and extraction of the subject and the latest versions of Photoshop have excellent tools to support that. Please note that some of the steps explained may require connection to the Internet as Photoshop might access Adobe cloud servers for execution.

Let us start with a simple image (Picture 1) to understand the process.

We recommend that you copy the background layer and perform all the editing on it. So, right-click on the background layer and choose Duplicate Layer. In case any damage occurs to the duplicated layer you can recover the same from the Background layer.

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From the Main menu of Photoshop,

Window > Contextual Task Bar

This will open the Contextual Task Bar. This will show 'Select Subject' in a field. Click on that to select the subject.

Alternately go to the Photoshop Toolbar and choose Select Subject (it is one of the selection tools) to select the subject.