- Histograms make muddy pictures history
- Fixing color casts
- Banish Red-eye
- The magic of cropping
- Straightening perspective fixes
- Fixing Blemishes
- Bringing out detail in shadows and highlights
- Quick and soft selections
- Reuse a selection
- Whiter teeth
- Smoother skin
- Facelifts without surgery
- Quick Layer fixes
- Non-permanent fixes
- Depth of field effect
- More interesting skies
Depth of field effect
When you've taken a photograph of something like a flower, with a digital camera , you may notice that the image has a large depth of field ( the objects behind and in front of the subject of the photo are all in focus too). This isn't usually the result you are going for and many of your photos would actually look better with a shorter depth of field, putting things behind and even in front of the subject out of focus.
You can create this effect using a blur filter by making a selection around the object to remain in focus and then feathering the selection by choosing SelectFeather. Then, apply a small feather of two or three pixels for a small image that is around two Megapixels in size and a larger value for a larger size image. Choose SelectInverse to invert the selection and apply a blur to it by choosing FilterBlurGaussian blur. Set the blur radius to an amount large enough to blur the area around the focal point in the image. If you like, you can blur objects in the foreground as well as in the background, and for an even more realistic effect, you can make a second selection and blur the objects furthest away from the camera just a little bit more than those closest to it.