Making photos look “cinematic” is a big trend these days, often times with various plugins and presets, but this hack brought to us by The Creative Contrast allows us to get photos with the trademark anamorphic bokeh that it hard, if not impossible, to fake in Photoshop. 

With just a glue stick, a UV filter, and some bristol board, we can create an artificial aperture for our lenses in order to give our backgrounds that oval, squeezed, shape that we see in movies and TV when they shoot on anamorphic lenses. While obviously, there is more to a cinematic look than just your bokeh, it’s nice to see a cheap and easy hack to add that final touch to your images. 

In the video, they don’t provide a perfect example, with the shape that they cut out not being a perfect oval, but it is still a wondrous example of how easy it can be to change the shape of your bokeh. Now, it would be nice to be able to replicate that signature anamorphic blue flare, but thankfully, that is relatively simple to add inside of Photoshop. With a steady hand and a little glue, it’s incredibly simple to recreate this project in just a few steps. Have you ever tried something like this? Sound off in the comments below.