Right straight to my question, I need to blur the output from the "image_map" node in Poser pro 11, preferably with a way to adjust the blur amount too. thank you anyone who helps me with this one.

IIRC, Bagginsbill has stated that he can use Poser's nodes to do anything except apply a proper soften or blur effect to an image. The old Castle Poser website, however, had a shader setup to blur an image using a noise node. Unfortunately Castle Poser seems to be offline, and the snapshot at the internet archive doesn't include the images showing how to set up the shader.

The basic idea seems to be to plug a noise node (or suitable substitute) into the U_Offset and V_Offset inputs on your Image_Map node. Varying the values of the Offset inputs and the min and max on the noise node allows some measure of control. The result isn't really a high quality blurring effect, as one might expect from an image editor. I'm not sure whether Poser can do any better.

Castle Poser at the Internet Archive is here: https://web.archive.org/web/20161119180102/http://castleposer.co.uk/articles/shader_blur.html

We looking to do this using shader nodes. Think some of the SSS nodes use convolution as an approx for scattering so they might offer something if the other effects of SSS can be removed. Don't have access to Poser at the moment so unable to check. What adjustments are required? If you need to do this in a hurry could not the effect be generated in another package and rotoscoped into the render as an avi?

i need this to be done to the actual imagemap node in the shader, not the final render, doing a blur is possible in an external package but having to do multiple extra images just for a blur effect is time consuming and annoying, and doesn't make my shader as easy to use. I will try the noise trick and see what it produces, thankyou both for your reply, hopefully this will be included in the next iteration of poser.

Me not being very clever, I would locate my related image map in the Poser textures department , copy it into Photoshop, then set up a new layer and use the Blur brush. You can move the intensity of the blur layer from 100 per cent down to zero, or the amount of blur you are looking for, then give your new blurred imagemap a new name and copy it back into the texture department. It works. (One of my favourite activities is manipulating multiple layers in Photoshop.) I'm pretty sure that all other photo software has the above functions.

Set-up using SSS to create blur - obviously its not going to behave well as a diffuse mat but might be worth a quick go.