If you're somebody who hates heavy-handed post-production, you might want to keep scrolling. For those of you who are happy to do whatever they can to get the image they want, here is an example of Adobe Photoshop's new beta Neural Filters in which the background of an image can be blurred.
In all honesty, I'm entirely worn out with the discussion of post-production of images. Some people claim that photography is a purists' profession and retouching should be minimal, some claim it's an art form where nothing is off-limits. The first cite competitions and pre-digital photography, the latter give examples of extreme editing in darkrooms for the last century or more. As far as I am concerned, there is no right answer, but if post-production interests you, Photoshop's Neural Filters will too.
We have seen the sharp ascent of AI depth of field in images, championed by mobile phone photography. With attractive bokeh as a physical consequence of aperture, focal length, and sensor size being currently all but impossible, post-processing had to fill the void. When my friend first took a picture of his family with his phone and used this background blurring AI, he showed me and I wanted to slap the phone from his hands. It could seldom be more obvious to anyone with even a passing interest in photography, but he was happy and that can't be a bad thing.
However, in the intervening decade or so, the quality of this algorithmic editing has improved tenfold, to the point where it now requires some attention to correctly identify fake depth of field. Photoshop's Neural Filters have an option to do this, and as Aaron Nace of PHLEARN shows in this video, it's mighty impressive, and with some intelligent tweaking, they can be almost indistinguishable.
Not bad! But honestly, I would choose a larger aperture or take several shots with different apertures. That's the much faster way to do it. And that was just one picture.
"Get it right in camera" is great when you're the photographer and you know what you want before you hit the shutter release. For those of us working with art directors, stock images, other photographers, or who can't always see into the future, there's Photoshop.
Or you're the designer, or the art director isn't sure (so you shoot sharp), or you're part of a distributed photo team working collaboratively, or...
Stop making presumptions.
And yet you're incredulous that your experience is not that of the rest of the world. Fascinating. You presumed that anyone working with stock would be an assistant. You were wrong. Look, if you don't find value in the tool, fine - don't use it. Attempting to denigrate others for using it is bizarre and small-minded. Your failure of imagination and ideas is not exactly a platform deserving of your arrogance.
This is very useful for designers, probably moreso than for photographers. If it actually works well it will save me a lot of time editing backgrounds to place copy, etc