I just tried a technique I learned from an article in my new March/April edition of PCPhoto magazine that involves the eraser tool. I used it the other day on a posting of my cat, Beau. Duplicate the layer then use the eraser tool to erase the dog from the duplicate layer. Uncheck the bottom layer first so you can see exactly what you are erasing. After erasing is completed, recheck the bottom layer and adjust the sharpness of that layer with unsharpen mask until the dog better matches the sharpness of Sam. Hope this helps. Peace/Jeff :-)

thanks mate ... sounds the thing

I wuz once described as having a "Wry Personallity"...not much help on Tech stuff...but...like to say,,,,hello...woof

One way that has worked well for me while capturing the shot instead of in postwork...stay back a ways from the subject and zoom in to your preference for your compo and use fill flash to freeze the subject. If your back toward the outside limit of your builtin flash it has negligible effect on the main subject.

Raz gives a good suggestion, but I'm not really so sure if the blur is movement or just a really shallow dof..... I would tend to think it's the aperture you choose to shoot with over movement from the dog..... I'm assuming this is film, since you mention "darkroom"..... but you didn't mention what lens you used or any settings or shutter speeds etc.... or even if postwork was done prior to you uploading here. I'm going to guess this is the original image, pretty much untouched. When I look at this, the background behind the little boy is extremely blurred..... this leads me to believe that you used a fairly wide open lens to shoot with...... maybe around f/2.8 or smaller???? Apertures settings effect not only the background but also the foreground..... so to make there is area both in front of and behind the focused area that will be affected by your aperture choice.... The boy was the object in focus, and anything immediately behind him dropped out of focus as well as anything immediately in front of him.... in other words a very shallow depth of field..... Does that seem to make any sense? I'm not sure how much help Photoshop is going to be in fixing this, to be honest....

Your right Michelle..on closer inspection the blur does seem to be dof instead of a localized motion blur. If you were good with a Wacom pad addiek you could sharpen up the highlights and shadows fairly quickly on the puppy's head w/dodge/burn tool. Other than that I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't enough definition in the image for unsharp mask or edge sharpening to do any good.