STEEMIT: ART #17 / Recreating The Bokeh Effect

The Bokeh effect comes about when your subject is in the foreground and their are lights in the background. The foreground gets the focus and the blurry out of focus background turns lights into tiny orbs that create a pleasant feeling for some.

These sorts of photos are typically taken at night, but the same effect can happen during the day.

I wanted to walk through the steps required in making this effect on demand and use this knowledge to make the next set of assets for my Steemit logo art series.

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Step 1: Find an image with the bokeh effect

I used this one from unsplash.com.

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Step 2: Create a representation of the bokeh effect

I use Inkscape for my approach, but at this point you could use anything. The downside to physical mediums is that it should be large enough so that it can be applied in larger applications.

As I am ramping up designs for t-shirts, I know I will need to scale to 300 dpi and still have it look good. It makes sense for me to use Inkscape as vectors can scale to be large enough where my initial design dimensions don't matter.

The bokeh effect can be broken down as having the following components.

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EDGE FADE

Half of the border is slightly lighter than the rest of the circle then fades into the color that represents the majority of the color seen.

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OPACITY

There is an opacity to these shapes that allows new colors to be seen when the shapes overlap.

Based on this table I made, I'll be choosing a 20% opacity as that level is still bright, yet I can see through the shapes. 10% is too dim based on the original image.

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SKEW VARIETY

There are several skews used and occasionally there is no skew on the shape. The skew shifts the shape to be an oval and adds to the diversity of shapes.

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COLOR PALETTE

This particular image stood out to me for its color palette. There are several colors here, I couldn't imagine working together, but here they are.

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Step 3: Apply the techniques from step 2 and place bokeh!

Finally, we have gotten to the fun part. I need to go afk, but here is one way to apply our bokeh techniques.

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I would have never thought to try a bokeh version of the Steemit logo if I wasn't lurking through the looking for niche chatroom. Thank you.