Regarding selective blurring with the history brush, you can do the same thing with sharpening. Over-sharpen the image, move back one step in the history palette, then use the sharpened state as the source for the history brush. It often helps to sharpen certain definite boundaries in faces, particularly eyes, mouth, nose, eyebrows. Just be sure to use a low opacity setting on the tool so you make changes gradually. It's like a woman putting on makeup, you want to cover certain areas and enhance others. And speaking of sharpening, another procedure I do a lot is to convert the image to LAB color before I sharpen. Then I only do the sharpening on the Lightness channel. In LAB, The Lightness channel is a gray-scale channel that contains only the image detail, no color information. The A and B channels contain only color info. One of the problems with sharpening in color images is that artifacts will "bloom" as you sharpen, i.e. you'll see glowing pixels suddenly jump out at some point. If you sharpen only on the Lightness channel in LAB, this doesn't happen and you can sharpen more than you normally could in RGB or CMYK. You can also work some wonders on really bad posterized images by heavily blurring on the A and B channels in LAB. Since the detail is all on the Lightness channel, you won't blur the image boundaries, only the color. If you need to, you can apply a smaller amount of blur to the Lightness channel, then selectively sharpen certain areas with the history brush. It is an art, no doubt about it, and it takes some practice. For a bad example of this stuff, look at http://www.crfranklin.com/photo.2.gif for a real crappy "before" pic and http://www.crfranklin.com/photo.3.jpg for a less crappy "after" pic. Again, not a good pic in any case. Gromit