I shoot landscapes of agricultural scenes primarily - a lot of animals with backgrounds of grass, scrub, and now bare tree branches etc.etc.. When using long focal lengths - there can be a lot of what has been described by others as bokeh "double vision" (note my Zuiko lens produces really beautiful bokeh in other conditions - and most of the time it's not so much of an issue).
You are probably experiencing
spurious resolution, caused by nisen-
Bokeh (due to overcorrected spherical aberration). It is best to prevent it if it affects your images negatively, either by using a different aperture if possible, or a different lens with better qualities for your type of images.
Prevention is much better than cure, unless you can afford to spend a lot of time on postprocessing.
That said, I use PS(5) a lot, but have never used the "blur tool set" - and I would like to know if a photographer who is shooting with the above conditions (or sim.) can recommend a method using the blur tools (or perhaps others) that can somewhat obscure or ameliorate this affect. I'm in the middle of a heavy shooting schedule, and I don't have time to experiment/test it all out right now...so I would appreciate any feedback/guidlines/methods etc. etc. Thanks much.
There are no simple recipes, unless your images are easy to post-process (significant separation between object and background, e.g. by color or brightness). The process involves broadly 2 stages. One is creating a mask for your main subject (which might be hard but that depends on the actual image). Two is creating a lens blur layer with depth gradient to make it look realistic. Whether the blur will look better, depends on how it is currently looking. You might have to avoid some pitfalls to avoid a halo type of effect. Retouching like this requires some skill.
Not something you would like to do routinely, so it's better avoided when taking the image in the first place.
An example image might help to see if alternative strategies could offer a better workflow.
Cheers,
Bart
