Help with this shot

[Death Hormone]

Edit: Also if this is in the wrong forum, I apologize and could a mod please move the topic, if needed be.

Hey all, I've just made the jump to SLR and picked up a Cannon 400D, I've started off doing some street photography to grips with things, There's still alot of stuff I dont understand and need to learn.

I recently took this shot, and put it in B&W using Lightroom. I've now tried my hand in photoshop and thought about blurring out the guy to the far left as i kinda think he's too much in focus and should have used a wider aperture at the time. Any thoughts?

I'll have to look up tutorials for PS since, I don't have much of a idea how to use that.

[LaPistola]

Open in PS

First lest set PS up. Click Edit > Preferences > Cursors. In the painting cursors tick full size brush tip. Apply

Now to the work

Double click the background layer (which should be the only layer with the photo in) > Click OK > Right Click the layer > Convert to smart layer > Effects > Blur > Gaussian Blur

Play with the sliders until you happy there is enough blur. Don't worry about it blurring the whole image or being to much. Apply

Now you will see there is something under the layer. Click into the white section. This is a mask. Press G (bucket or gradiant tool) then D (sets default colours black - white). If is brings up the gradient tool then click and hold the left mouse button on the icon on the tool bar and the bucket tool will become available. Make sure the foreground colour is black, if not press x then click on the photo anywhere and the blur will go.

Press B on the keyboard (brush tool) then x to change the foreground colour to white. Now press the ] key and keep pressing it till its fairly large then hold down shift and press the {. You will notice the circle (if not already like this) go "fussy". This means your are spraying colour with a feathered edge. Now where you want to blur out you spray with the brush. If you go to far then you can spray it out with black. If the feather is to little and your at full feather ( shift+{ ) increase your brush size ( ] ).

If you need to bring back the amount of blur then there are 3 ways.
1. Change your colour to a gray and spray. This is like making parts of the mask opaque. The darker the gray the less the blur will show where you spray.
2. See in the layers the icon at the end of the row of the Gaussian blur. Double click and change the opacity.
3. As this is a smart layer, double click the row (not icon) Gaussian blur and just adjust the amount of blur with the original effect tool.

It may take you some time to get used to it all but practice will pro-vale. Make sure your only practicing on copies.

I know you posted this in the beginners section but hope its not to complicated.

[Death Hormone]

Originally Posted by LaPistola

Double click the background layer (which should be the only layer with the photo in) > Click OK > Right Click the layer > Convert to smart layer > Effects > Blur > Gaussian Blur

Thanks for the help, but I don't see the option to convert to smart layer, I'm using CS2 so perhaps its called something different?

[LaPistola]

Ahh sorry my mistake, should have asked. I do think smart layers (actually I think there called smart filters) came in CS3. CS2 had the smart object which isn't going to help with this.

In this case (forgetting a lot about CS2) you would duplicate your photo layer and apply the blur to the top photo. Then apply a mask to the blurly layer and then follow my above just after it creates the smart layer. Think of the blurly layer as the smart layer in my above tutorial.

EDIT: After looking there still called smart objects and the option is "convert to smart object" in CS5 but they open up smart filter use, just not in cs2.

If memory is correct in cs2, smart objects was a way make changes across multiple layers by adjusting one. Still the case now but with smart filters function.