Part 3: Photo Editing Made Simple
Photoshop® CS1 Made Easy
Adding a Softly Focused Background Photographers are always seeking ways to emphasize their subjects. One of the best, and easiest in Photoshop, is to blur the background, leaving the subject in focus. In this lesson, I’ll show you two different ways to add soft focus to your backgrounds.
Create a new editing layer As is often the case, the first thing we’ll need to do is to duplicate our background layer. In this example, I’ve just grabbed hold of the background layer and dragged it to the new layer icon (to the left of the trash can icon). If your Layers palette is not visible, select Window>Layers or press F7 on the keyboard.
Grab a Brush and Get to Work Next, we’ll need to click the icon just under the two large boxes of color on the right side of the Tools palette to begin editing in Quick Mask mode. Once you’ve done that, click the Brush icon and select a largish brush to paint the mask on the image. Here, I’ve selected a soft round brush of 65 pixels.
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