3-D Motion With The Radial Blur Filter

The Radial Blur filter is a great Photoshop filter, creating not only circular blur but also blur in three dimensions. This quick tutorial will show how to add three-dimensional motion to an object.

The Radial Blur filter is a lot of fun to use and can add a lot of energy and motion to your Photoshop designs. I especially like to use it to create three-dimensional type (I hope to do a tutorial on this soon) but it’s also great to add some three-dimensional motion to an object. Here’s how to do it:

Step 1: Start with an object on its own layer. Here I have a softball image on its own layer (no white pixels around it).

Figure 1: The original image.

Step 2: Duplicate the object onto another layer (Cmd/Ctrl-J is the keyboard shortcut for copying a layer).

Step 3: Select the top object layer and then select Filter –> Blur –> Radial Blur…. The Radial Blur dialog box (Figure 2) appears.

Figure 2: The Radial Blur dialog box, with settings.

Step 4: Duplicate the settings shown in Figure 2. The settings are self-explanatory and the diagram in the lower-right of the dialog box helps a lot, but basically we are creating a full zoom effect with draft quality. You can step up the quality if you like, but I find draft quality to be good enough for most work. If you haven’t noticed, you can drag the midpoint in the diagram to specify where the zoom originates. By placing it in the lower-left quadrant, we will be creating motion from lower-left to upper-right.

Step 5: Press Return/Enter to create the zoom. The zoom moves away from the midpoint so the motion we end up with is actually of the ball moving toward the midpoint from the foreground (Figure 3). If that’s your intent then you are practically done; however, let’s take it a step further and modify the zoom blur so the ball is truly moving from left to right.

Figure 3: The blur has been created, but it’s moving from foreground to background.

Step 6: Using Free Transform (Edit –> Free Transform, or Cmd/Ctrl-T) rotate and scale the blurred image until it looks like the zoom is terminating on the object (see Figure 4). Depending on how the image was blurred, you may have a sharp edge to the right where the blur met the right edge of the image. We’ll clean that up next.

Figure 4: The blur has been moved.

Step 7: Add a layer mask to the blurred layer and, with a soft-edged brush roughly the size of the softball (or other object), mask the pixels on top of the object as well as any stray pixels. Depending on your taste you can mask all the pixels on top of the object, or do what I did and leave a small bit of pixels on top of the object so the elements of it can seem a bit blurry. Figure 5 shows my final image.

Figure 5: The final image!