The Beautiful Caragh (pronounced "Cara" in English)



I placed this beautiful young lady in one of Dreamlight's wonderful Gothic backgrounds, or backdrops if you prefer.

Of course, I couldn't leave well enough alone and ended up tinkering with it again!

Lately I've been amusing myself by trying to create a convincing Depth of Field effect in these scenes. As most of you know, you don't get true DOF when using Environments instead of that Primitive Plane gizmo... which I still thoroughly dislike!

My first attempt was simple enough. I cropped the background to match the aspect ratio of the render and applied a Gaussian Blur. The result certainly looked like DOF... but it blurred everything and wasn't quite what I had in mind.

After a bit of trial and error, I separated the area around Caragh's feet, leaving that section sharp while blurring the rest of the background. That did the trick beautifully and gave me the effect I was looking for.

The other option was the old Photoshop gradient blur method. I gave that a go as well, but to my eye it looked rather terrible!

In the end, after a little experimentation and a fair amount of fiddling, I finally got it the way I wanted.

I hope you like the result as much as I enjoyed creating it.



Sláinte, a chairde!