The latest generation phones have the bokeh effect, which is the blurring of the background to enhance portraits, here’s how to get it thanks to apps
The Bokeh effect, which is the focusing of objects in the foreground while leaving the rest blurred, has always been very popular among photography enthusiasts. But in recent times, the blurred background effect is one of the most used by smartphone users.
If we own a smartphone that has the Bokeh setting by default, all we have to do is activate it to take advantage of this effect to enhance the subjects in the foreground. If, however, our phone does not have this feature we’ll have to “fiddle” a bit ‘in the settings of our camera with third-party applications to get the background effect blurred. The effect is caused by a reduced depth of field, i.e. the distance between the nearest object in focus in a photo and the furthest one.
How to do Bokeh effect on smartphones
Depth of field and bokeh effect work differently on smartphones than on regular cameras. The necessary element to achieve a quality background blur is the processing power of the software of the photo sensor of our phone. The smartphone camera must, in fact, recognize the foreground and background of a photo, and then blur the latter while keeping the foreground in focus. So, in the smartphone the Bokeh effect is nothing more than a post-production work done automatically by the software of our camera. For this reason, if our phone does not have by default the function to blur the background we will have to download an application from the App Store or Google Play Store to be able to get the same result. Among the best compatible for iOS and Android we find AfterFocus: as you can guess from the name it allows you to manage the focus of a shot already present in our gallery. Bokeh Lens, however, is an iOS-only app that allows you to make the background blurred with the iPhone in a simple and immediate way: just point the subject and shoot. The app will take care of the rest.
To take photos with a blurred background with Instagram, all you need to do is open the photo social app par excellence, access the camera and select the Portrait effect: the app’s artificial intelligence will recognize the faces in the shot and will blur the background.