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JULY 22, 2002 Faking DOF with Adobe Photoshop Digital cameras are great, but sometimes they are just impossible to use to get a decent Depth of Field. In this quick tutorial, you’ll use Adobe Photoshop to tweak those digital images. Start by opening you’re image. In this exercise I’m using a picture of a sunflower. I really don’t want the background to have that much detail, but want the head of the sunflower to stand out. [an error occurred while processing this directive]
Use the lasso tool to draw an area around your subject. In this case, the magnetic lasso is perfect because it will snap to the edges of the sunflower petals.   Expand the selection by a desired amount. For the sunflower I expanded the selection by 30 pixels.  Invert the selection. Any filters you will apply will apply to everything by the sunflower.  If you were to apply a filter now, there would be a very harsh line between the affected and unaffected regions. Feather the selection, to blur the selected area.   Finally apply the Gaussian blur filter and adjust to your liking.  When you are finished you should end up with a nice depth of field effect and a way to make sure your subject is the center of focus in the image.  When not working deep in the labs of the DMN Central Division testing the latest and greatest software/hardware products Stephen Schleicher can be found at the local university teaching a few courses on video and web production. He can be reached at schleicher@mindspring.com. You can also visit him on the web at www.mindspring.com/~schleicher
Related sites: • Animation Artist • Animation Supplement • Content Mastering • Corporate Media News • Creative Mac • Design Supplement • Digital Animators • Digital Media Designer • Digital Post Production • Digital Producer • Digital Video Editing • Digital Webcast • Mac Supplement Related forums: [an error occurred while processing this directive] 
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