Bokeh
The look of a photo's out-of-focus areas, especially how background lights melt into soft glowing orbs.
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What it is
Bokeh (from the Japanese 'boke', blur) is not how much blur you have, it is the character of the blur. Depth of field decides how much of the frame goes soft; bokeh decides whether that softness looks like melted butter or like a jittery mess. Point highlights behind the subject get rendered as the shape of the lens opening, which is why a round aperture gives round orbs and a nine-blade one gives faint nonagons.
Reach for it when a subject needs to float in a wash of light: fairy lights, wet city streets at night, sun coming through leaves, a bar backdrop. The lens vocabulary is a real thing to name in a brief: 'soap bubble' bokeh has a bright ring on each orb, mirror lenses give donuts with a hole in the middle, and anamorphic lenses stretch the orbs into ovals.
Gotcha: bokeh needs something to work with. Open a fast lens against a flat gray wall and you get a flat gray wall, slightly softer. You need separated point sources well behind the subject. The other trap is 'busy' or 'nervous' bokeh, the double-edged jittery kind some lenses produce, which reads cheap rather than dreamy.
Ask AI for it
Render this with pronounced bokeh: 85mm f/1.4 lens shot wide open, subject tack sharp, background filled with out-of-focus point lights blooming into large round orbs with soft feathered edges that overlap and stack. Warm amber and gold highlights against a dark scene, orbs growing larger toward the frame edges, smooth creamy transition between them. No hard polygonal shapes, no bright double-edged rings, no digital blur halo around the subject's outline.