Professional-Looking Motion-Blur Effect for Your Images

1. Open your target image in photoshop, as always the greater the resolution of the image you’re working with, the greater it will demonstrate the effect.
2. First step is to create a copy of your layer.

3. With our new layer selected, navigate to ‘Filter -> Blur -> Radial Blur’ on the main menu. In the ‘Radial Blur’ dialog, set your blur settings as follows. You can adjust the ‘Amount’ and ‘Quality’ settings as you wish, depending the effect you are going for
4. Our image should now look something like this: 

5.  we’re going to take the eraser tool and use it to expose our subject beneath the blur. With our new layer selected simply use the eraser tool to remove the blur from our subject The brush size you use will depend on the size of your image, my brush settings are as pictured.

6. Now we should really see our effect taking shape. I’ve erased away the blur from the my baseball player and left the radiating blur effect around him.

7. Finally, navigate to ‘Image -> Adjustments -> Levels’ on the main menu. Here we will adjust our color levels to further enhance the effect, again depending on the image you’re working on, your settings will most likely differ from mine however simply adjust the levels setting the by dragging the level indicators circled below until you’re happy with the effect. These are the settings I used:

8. Voila! Our finished effect. I’ve added some text which of course is totally up to you depending on the project you’re creating.