Shooting for a blurred panning effect—by moving with your subject to keep it sharp while the background goes fuzzy—isn’t easy. It takes planning, practice, and often some cooperation from your subject. And sometimes you find yourself in a situation where, as much as you’d like the effect, you’re unable to manage it—such as when you’re shooting a moving subject out the window of a train, as with the image here. Fortunately, motion blur, like many photographic effects, is possible to recreate with software. Here’s how to create a panning effect using Adobe Photoshop. This tutorial takes advantage of CS5’s new tools like Content-Aware Fill and Smart Objects, but the instructions can be used in older versions of Photoshop and Photoshop Elements—you only really need Layers and the Motion Blur filter.
