How can I blur the background like in this example

[Roger Due]

Please take a look at the attached file where I asked Mark Robinson how he achieved the blurred background. He explained how he does it with Light Room. I have Affinity Photo, Publisher, & Designer. How can I accomplish a similar effect with your tools, or do I need some additional tools from you?

[NotMyFault]

Hi,

• create selection of bird
• invert selection
• add noise removal live filter (it uses the selection as mask)
• Deactivate selection
• adjust luminance value to 100

another approach:

• create selection of bird
• Duplicate selected area (copy / paste ) to get copy on new layer
• deactivate layer
• choose lower layer
• Reselect (old selection of bird)
• erase selected area (bird)
• Use inpaint function (you may need to grow selection by e.g. 20px ) to get area lookin like background
• now you can use any blur filter to smooth background or create artificial bokeh
• activate layer with bird again

[RichardMH]

If you do this a lot, look at Topaz Denoise as a plug in. They have a free trial. I use it for nearly all my wildlife shots.

[carl123]

This is how I usually do it

In APhoto....

Use the Selection Brush Tool to make a selection of the subject
Refine the selection and output to a new layer (hide that layer for now)
On the original background layer reactivate the previous selection of the subject
Use Edit > Inpaint to "remove" subject (prevents halos)
Reactive subject layer
Add live gaussian blur filter layer to background layer and adjust to taste

Tweak as required/necessary