Hi All this is another postwork tip for Photoshop involving the History brush.

I use it for creating a feeling of depth of view or "field" which helps to soften distracting backgrounds which are competing for your eye attention.
First of all we go to FILTER in the drop down menu, the BLUR and then GAUSSIAN BLUR. Change the pixel radius to taste and then apply the filter to the whole image.

Then go the HISTORY pallet and you will see the Gaussian blur that you have just applied, at the side of this you will see an empty box, click in this and a history brush icon will appear.
You have now set the source for the history brush.
In the history go back one state before you applied the Gaussian blur and the effect will now disappear

Go to the tools menu and choose the History brush tool, I normally choose a soft brush and reduce the opacity.

I can now paint onto the image the Gaussian blur effect in just the areas that I want in a very controlled manner creating reduced depth of focus and separating the main point of interest from the background.

You can also use this technique with the other filters too.

Hope you find this useful and have a great Christmas & New year.

Regards

Keith

You lost me little on this...why do you need to undo what you did with the blur and do it again with the History Brush?

"You lost me little on this...why do you need to undo what you did with the blur and do it again with the History Brush?" This is why: "I can now paint onto the image the Gaussian blur effect in just the areas that I want in a very controlled manner creating reduced depth of focus and separating the main point of interest from the background."

Yeah Sam, I read that. Evidently you missed the fact that that isn't enough explanation or I wouldn't have asked for details. I can already "paint onto the image the Gaussian blur effect in just the areas that I want in a very controlled manner creating reduced depth of focus and separating the main point of interest from the background" using the Gaussian Blur. So I assumed there must be a more indepth reason to redo it using the History Brush.

So whatever filter efect you want, you can put onto the "history brush" in this manner? So that you can brush it on instead of the overall effect?

Aureeanna, The first step effects the entire image. With the history brush, just selected parts. Use the first step to store the effect to the history brush. Hope that helps.

I don't know if there is a history brush in Paint Shop Pro, but I think I can get a similar effect in PSP by having two copies of the same graphic, applying the Gaussian blur to one, and applying the cloned blur effect to the second graphic (I added a layer first to give myself even more control over the resulting effects). You can get a very controlled effect this way (at least in PSP 9) and I bet it is somewhat similar to the the one in Photoshop, unless I completely misunderstood the idea. Actually a neat trick to add some special effects to your graphics. Thanks for the cool tip.

Thanks for the tip, I never could figure out what that tool was for lol. Course if I'd a known it would be this useful maybe I'd have looked harder eh? So thank you I am sure I will be trying this little tidbit out! ;)

That does help, thanks!

Nice tip, but as another method you could just duplicate the layer, GBlur/apply filter of choice then add a layer mask (with hide all) and (air)brush white into the mask to reveal the parts of the filter effect you want to see where you want to see it.

Hi thanks glad you like it. Thanks lundqvist for the alternative, thats what we love about Photoshop lots of ways to do the same thing;-) Regards Keith

"lots of ways to do the same thing" "add a layer mask (with hide all) and (air)brush white into the mask" Or you could simply use the eraser tool to erase parts of the original layer and merger the layers when you're done. Shouldn't this be in the Adobe Photoshop forum? Of course, no one would see it there.

All info is nice to have, whereever it might end up. :)

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"Or you could simply use the eraser tool to erase parts of the original layer and merger the layers when you're done." True, but with a mask you can undo/redo edits. If you delete from the duplicated layer directly you'd have recreate it if you wanted to back out or try something different. Shrug. Also imagist, thanks for reminding me of the history brush, I tend to overlook that feature and it recently helped me out a lot :)