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best way to blur background?


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Sprool

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Hi - hope you can help with this one. I'm using CS5 to edit DSLR photos, I want to do a big radial zoom blur on the stormy clouds in the background without touching the building in front of it. I tried a mask and a cut'n'paste but the blur brings in unwanted stuff at the edges. What's the best way to do this cleanly?
 
Make a new layer of the house by using the pen tool or painting over it in quick mask maybe, then blur out in whatever way you choose the original image below it?
 
The radial and motion blur smears the pixels from the edge of the house into the sky so you end up with a fuzzy smudgy halo surrounding it. That's what I'm trying to avoid.
 
why don't you post up the image so we can get a better understanding of what you are up against?
P.S try a gaussian blur
 
ok heres a smaller version to show you what the problem is. Sky was marquees off then radial blur/zoom added.
 

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Are you shooting in raw format the first thing you need to do is correct your exposure so you get some texture in the clouds also white balance looks off but my eyes are blurry at the moment so maybe I am wrong ok once you have corrected the image to however you like duplicate the layer use the quick selection tool to select the sky hold shift down to add to it and hold alt down to remove from selection then you can either go to edit copy then edit paste and apply the radial blur which is the best method if you want to do a high pass filter on it first to get some texture to make the blur more detectable however you will then need to apply a layer mask and using a soft low opacity brush make sure the edges of the building are back sharp by stroking more in black on the layer mask. I f you dont copy and paste your selection then once it is selected then go to blur filter and it will only apply to what you have selected
 
Thanks Hoog, this shot is actually in jpg but I am aware that raw format enables a lot more detail from clouds, I have no problem in doing the HDR sky stuff.
So if I understand correctly:
1) Select the sky
2) copy it on top as a new layer
3) Blur the new sky layer
4) soften the edges back by working on the layer mask of the non-sky area?
 
or ya could cut the building out into a layer..the use the liquify tool and pull the building down to nothin. then replace the building. use smudge with a giant brush to get the effect you want/ probably the fastest way to do it.
 
well make sure your building edges are sharp but you can slowly build up the layer mask as the contrast will be similar dont use hard edges in the sky
 
I would say the fastest way would be
select > colour range click the eye dropper on the sky slide fuzziness up until your happy with the selection so less than 10 seconds
then filter > blur > radial blur choose settings another 15 seconds
if it is slightly to strong then go to edit > fade > radial blur ao it blends in better no need for a layer mask as the filter will not work outside of the initial selection so yes it can be done in less than 45 seconds if it is about speed
 
What worked best for me was to cut out a copy of the sky, paste this as new layer, then blur this with radial zoom. I then put a copy of the building back over the top of this and smudged the blurred sky edges back underneath the building where the blur had picked up some non-sky traces. Thanks for the input.
 
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