Adobe® Photoshop® CS2 Studio Techniques

The Lens Blur Filter

If you'd like to make a large area of your image blurry, then you should try out the Lens Blur filter. Unlike the standard blur filters (Blur, Blur More, and Gaussian Blur), which blur your entire image the same amount, the Lens Blur filter will vary the amount of blurring that occurs (Figures 16.98 and 16.99), based on the contents of a grayscale image (Figure 16.100) (which you can create by using the Paintbrush tool). You can specify which shade of gray should represent an area that you want to keep in focus. Photoshop will then make all the other areas of the image progressively out of focus based on how different the surrounding shades of gray are compared to the one you specified as the in-focus shade. But it's really ...