Easy Beautiful Love Bubble

[kevin_tee]

Today I will show you how to make easy beautiful simple bokeh with gimp and g’mic.
Open your image.

Use high bit depth for smooth color gradient, I don’t know what the setting meant so lets go with the default.

Duplicate the first layer and blur it alot with gaussian blur.

Go to filter > g’mic and artistic>bokeh

Adjust setting as you please, don’t worry about the color. Make sure that the output is new layer.

Select your bokeh layer and select mode to be Value. Now the magic happen. We got something like this.

Merge down to combine bokeh layer and blur layer.

Select the bokeh layer and change the mode to screen. Use eraser tool to remove bokeh from undesired place. And we are done!

[afre (Alan)]

Reminds me of soap bubbles FYI, I added the gmic tag.

[houz]

@David_Tschumperle: Would it be possible to rename the G’MIC filter to “fake lens blur” or something like that? “Bokeh” means something else.

[darix]

The original photo has a nice bokeh. those balls are not adding anything to the image except for distractions from your subject.

[kevin_tee]

True, but this is just a demonstration, probably a bad one.

[MLC (Morgin)]

It’s not a bad example at all. It’s actually quite a good one, if you ask me.

Although it may not be everyone’s cup of tea, this type of effect is rather sought after by some and demonstrating how to achieve it using FLOSS software can only be beneficial in spreading the word that Adobe is not the only game in town.

My only critique would be the use of the eraser tool in lieu of a layer mask. A minor quibble brought on by a personal affinity for the use of layer masks. Pay it little mind.

[heckflosse (Ingo Weyrich)]

I agree with @houz. Simulating this effect is far more complex (different size, shape and intensity of the bubbles), as you can see in this example shot with a Nikkor AIS 1.8/105mm lens af 1.8:

[afre (Alan)]

To be fair, this G’MIC’s bokeh filter is under the artistic category, and has 18 parameters including shape.

[houz]

My main problem isn’t that it’s obviously not physically correct, but that the word “bokeh” does not mean “circles in the out of focus region” or “blurring parts of an image” or anything like that. The word has the specific meaning of describing the quality of the out of focus regions. Using it the way it is used here makes the writer look silly. It’s like saying to “add more nice” to an image. Or something like that.

[gaaned92]

@houz
You are absolutly right, but if you google “bokeh”, you will see appear a lot of images with this kind of bubbles.
As @MLC noticed, this so called Bokeh effect seems popular.

[David_Tschumperle (G'MIC staff)]

So, is there a consensus for a new name for the ‘Bokeh’ filter in G’MIC ?
Any other idea than “fake lens blur” ? (which IMHO is not what really what the filter does, and what already have a “Lens Blur” filter somewhere in G’MIC).

[Claes]

@David_Tschumperle

Any other idea than “fake lens blur” ?

Fake Bokeh?

[afre (Alan)]

@David_Tschumperle

Any other idea than “fake lens blur” ?

Was waiting for you to ask. This effect is called love bubbles, related to the bishie sparkle.

I would call it “bubble bokeh” or “frozen bubble” , although there are other shapes.