Josh Adamski is a photographer with a signature style. I came across his name while watching YouTube videos about current and past photographers who have developed a “niche” in their photography. Born in Israel in 1948, he now lives in England.

Most of his images feature a sharply defined subject set against a surreal and impressionistic background. If you look online for examples of his work, you’ll mostly see landscapes and seascapes, though he also works in other genres that show his signature impressionistic style. I thought it might be fun to take some of my photos and attempt to mimic his style. As they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and I can also say that I am not sure that I was always successful in my experimentation. I started by searching for the effect on YouTube and found several videos that showed how to use Photoshop to emulate it. The video I used as a tutorial is here.

With Photoshop’s Content-Aware subject selection and tools, the YouTubers made it look easy. Though I rent both Lightroom and Photoshop from Adobe, I use the latter sparingly, as I seldom need the tool. It turns out that the latest versions of Photoshop have one component that neither Lightroom nor Luminar Neo has. My experiments would be a lesson in frustration, as I had real issues getting the tools to work for selecting and removing the subject. What I learned is that if the subject is complex, I simply couldn’t make those “moving ants” select what I wanted, and the content-aware module wasn’t having much better luck than I on some images.

This oil-on-resin sculpture is as real as it gets. It presented a problem typical of content-aware masking for me. Try as I might, I couldn’t get the swim cap, which was covered with Swarovski crystals, to be part of the selection. I had to create two masks, one for the cap and one for the sculpture.

Once I created the masks, I saved them on separate layers, then selected the layer with the background and subject. Using the Content-Aware Fill tool, select the subject (in this case, two), and erase the subject. Content-Aware Fill did an imperfect job of erasing, but that’s OK anyway, as the other layers cover the imperfections.

At this point, I strayed a bit from the video using the Blur… filter instead of the Blur Gallery. Both tools work similarly, but the gallery offers modes that can create curved angles, as shown in the YouTube video link. In the Motion Blur filter, for all of these images, I chose 500 to 1000 for distance and an angle that seemed appropriate for the image. A slider and a rotating circle let me experiment with background motion-blur adjustments in real time.

When I was done, the swim mask was almost invisible, as Photoshop made it nearly translucent. Not being very conversant with Photoshop’s other tools, I ended up loading the image into Luminar Neo and manually generating a mask on the cap, then lowering the exposure. I know this is easy to do in Photoshop on the cap’s mask layer, but I just couldn’t make it work for me.

My take on this image is that the native New Yorker was walking by a statue completely oblivious to its existence. Surely he probably walked by it a million times before. This subject was easy to define and separate from the background in Photoshop, and the content-aware fill worked perfectly.

This image is probably the most like Adamski’s work. It was the first one I attempted. I used Luminar Neo’s background removal to create the mask and saved it separately as a PNG. Then I loaded the subject mask image and the full image into Photoshop. I hoped to keep the process entirely in Lightroom/Neo, but I soon realized I could isolate the subject, remove it from the background, complete the layer masks, and so on; however, neither program can create motion blur.

Once in Photoshop, Content-Aware Fill removed the subject from the background layer, and I easily converted the subject to a layer to overlay the background blur I created. I only set the distance to 500 pixels. I left the angle at 0 degrees to create a horizontal blur.

Photoshop did an excellent job separating the subject from the background, even around the flowers on his hat. Subjects like this make the conversion easy. If you try this technique and, like me, you aren’t that conversant with Photoshop, be sure the subjects you choose are easily delineated from the background. This conversion took only a few minutes. (Edit: Johnbo from the future here… Masking in Lightroom, Photoshop, and Luminar are much better than when this article was first written.

You might ask why you need to remove the subject from the background before applying motion blur. After all, the subject in the background layer is hidden behind the subject mask. If you don’t remove the subject from the background layer, applying motion blur will show streaks of the subject’s colors spreading into the background, destroying the effect you are trying to achieve.

One day while walking around downtown Fargo, this gentleman walked up to me and struck up a conversation. He asked lots of questions about why I was photographing the architecture around the city. I told him about my interest in historical buildings, and he asked if I would take his picture.

This subject was easily separated from its background. There were a couple of areas where I went in and fixed the minor spots where the mask didn’t quite get the clip just right.

At a Native American Pow Wow, I saw this little guy standing and watching the group performing. His pensive look told me that he might have pre-show jitters. His group would be going on next. The original image captured audience members and folding chairs behind him. I adjusted the angle in the background layer, and the 45-degree setting gave me the most pleasing background. I set the distance at 1000 pixels.

The subject mask was perfect almost everywhere except around the headdress. As it happened, there was a part of an arm from a spectator right behind his face. The subject selection included a small part of that arm below his chin and behind his cheek. I decided I could fix the issues in Neo more easily than in Photoshop.

Once in Neo, I used the clone tool to select the background color just behind his face and then carefully removed the remnants of the spectator’s arm. I did the same procedure to fill in the area between the two long feathers in his headdress. I also selected that area as part of the subject in the mask layer. Selecting that gray area on the left, below the feathers, as a source for the clone let me copy those pixels into the area between the feathers.

You can view all of these images, plus a couple more examples, in 2K HD on my Flickr site here. My personal favorites of this attempt at the Adamski Effect are the lady on the beach and the Native American. I’d love to read your thoughts in the comments about the effect and whether or not you might consider attempting your own version of Josh Adamski’s signature style.

John Steiner

Edited 8/24/2026