Real World Compositing with Adobe Photoshop CS4

Perfecting Focus

Once you have your layer content in place, scaled, and masked as needed, it is sometimes necessary to create the illusion of continuous and smooth changes to focus levels, from the foreground to the background. This can be less an issue with commercial images such as advertisements, because they tend to blur the backgrounds and focus on the products or people in the foreground (in some cases there’s no discernable background detail at all).

Focus work is commonly required for composites that involve landscapes and other images with relatively long distances between the farthest discernable object in the frame and the viewer. Airport terminals and train platforms are also good examples of images that might require some real focus ...