Sometimes subtle blur is best.

I was in Alabama for several days a few weeks ago.  Every day I would pass this AC-47, the first Gunship in the Air Force inventory.  It was stagnant and lonely, a once guns blazing wicked machine bred for intimidation and mayhem was now sitting all lonesome in a static display.  Everyday I thought about that plane in all of its glory and just how sweet it must have looked in its heyday.

Certainly, I am not a proponent of war and I do not like thinking about the casualties that may have come from this gunship.  But it is a modern marvel.  Most people wouldn’t think of opening an Airplane window let alone stick a gun out the side of it.  It just amazes me what technologies we get out of military research.

Before I get too off track here, I couldn’t let this plane be a static display.  So I snapped a shot of it and did my normal HDR magic, at least I think its magic!  Then I just had to make this thing look like it was in its prime.

In this tutorial I will show you how I used the Path Blur tool to make the miniguns look like they were spinning in motion, guns blazing.

Tips for Path Blur:

1. The whole image does not have to blur, duplicate the desired layer prior to spinning and use masks to recover parts of the original.
2. In this tutorial I use the default settings, but experiment with the Speed of the blur for a faster or slower effect.

Like the style of this tutorial?  You will LOVE HDR Insider!  Full-Length HDR Workflows, Critiques & More!

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Blake Rudis

f.64 Academy and f.64 Elite are the brainchildren of Blake Rudis. While he is a landscape photographer, he is most passionate about post-processing images in Photoshop and mentoring others.

For Blake, it's all about the art and process synergy. He dives deep into complex topics and makes them easy to understand through his outside-the-box thinking so that you can use these tricks in your workflow today!