Boke is the Japanese word for "fog" or "haze". Bokeh is photographers' jargon for an intentionally blurred background with highlights. The two words are closely related.
I don't like to use Photoshop filters all that often, but sometimes it's fun to experiment. My old version of Photoshop won't generate bokeh automatically, but I would bet that there is more recent software that will.
I photographed a rose and then rotoscoped it in Painter. You can see that some of the larger paint strokes survived the ravages of Photoshop's filters, if you look close enough.
To achieve the bokeh effect, I created a duplicate layer of the entire image and set it to overlay. I applied Photoshop's Maximum Pass filter, which does a very good job of breaking down an image into light-coloured squares. Then I took the filtered layer, duplicated that again, and applied Maximum Pass again. This second layer I set to darken, lowered the opacity to around 50% and applied about 10% radial blur. I re-combined the two filtered layers and used the eraser to dig away at any part of the layers that I thought were taking away from the detail of the image. Primarily, I erased the center of the bloom and part of the stem.
There we go, a rose bokeh.
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