By Robert Lachman

This week I?m going to review Bokeh from Alien Skin Software, a plug-in used with Photoshop and Photoshop Elements.

The basic concept of the software is to make your subject stand out or pop by using the software to create vignettes or shallow depth of field with the background. The software makes things fuzzy, but that?s a good thing if you can control where the out-of-focus goes. Sounds complicated, but not with Bokeh from Alien Skin. It?s very simple and well designed software. Let?s take a look at who the program is designed for.

First you need Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. It can be used by the professional or amateur who wants to bring some isolation or snap to the subject matter. Maybe you have a very distracting background and too much depth-of-field.
Alien Skin says, ?Bokeh is the only software that accurately simulates the distinctive blurring and creamy highlights of real lenses.

You can manipulate focus just like fast expensive lenses with Bokeh, Alien Skin?s lens simulator Photoshop plug-in. Bokeh can draw attention to your subject by manipulating focus and depth of field after the shot has been taken.? It is true, the software you can really make your subject jump out or snap.

And, in the long run, you can save yourself some money on buying specialty lenses because this software can replace them in some situations. Certainly, if your shooting in a journalistic or editorial situation, I wouldn?t recommend it, but for the wedding, portrait shooter or amateur photographers it would be ideal.

A tilt-shift lens is out of the realm of most amateur?s budgets. Very few know what a Lensbaby is to add the creative tilt-shift effect and most would have a hard time reaching into their pockets to buy a 85 mm f/1.2 lens to isolate your subject with a super-shallow depth-of-field.

Bokeh does a great job simulating all of these lenses after shooting your images. For the testing, I used Bokeh with Photoshop Element 6. You just open your image, then go to the filter menu, then select Alien Skin Bokeh. Next you can select from three tabs, Setting, Bokeh and Vignette.

Selecting vignette will give you a chance to select the color, size and feather of the effect. Choosing the Setting button gives you choices of the blur type. You can pick setting like Canon EF 85 mm f1.2 or a Nikon, Sony or Carl Zeis lens. How is that for lens control?

When you go to the Bokeh tab you get a chance to select your focus region regions like radial or planar. If you choose radial you get a circular tool with four handles which allows you to adjust the rotation and size of your sharpness area to give you the vignette.

Picking planar gives you the tilt-shift lens or Lensbaby effect where you control the blur from the edge to where you want if to be sharp on your subject. You have compete control with two handles. One larger circular handle which is the protected area and a smaller square handle which is the blurred area. You can push and drag the handles in any direction for complete control.

Next, for those who want add shallow depth-of-field, you will need to know how to make a selection to a new layer in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. Once you have your selection on a new layer you can add Bokeh and have a very realistic looking shallow depth-of-field.

The success is dependent on your competence in making a good selection. But once you do the effect, it is stunning.
This price of the software is $199 which isn?t cheap. I always tend to think plug-ins should be a more inexpensive, but it does take a lot of work by the developer to work out the formulas.

Bokeh, does speed up your workflow for isolating focus and vignetting. Alien Skin is offering a 20% discount on their website of all their software until December 24 of this year (2008). It would be tough to figure this stuff out in Photoshop for most of us. For the Mac, the software requires Photoshop CS3 or later or Photoshop Elements 4.0.1 or later.

Alien Skin does offer a full feature 30-day trial download of Bokeh from their website. I definitely would recommend Alien Skins? Bokeh software.