so how many of you actually use depth cue for your image creation? It's totally excellent... give this a try: those four little dots of color in the lower right hand corner of your render window? set the bottom three to black and turn on the depth cue then render as you normally would... it's a whole new set of effects and the camera placement and focal length dramatically alter the scene.. Now the real fun begins... if you export this image as a tif then the depth cues are saved in the alpha channel! load that puppy up in photoshop and switch over to the channels. Drag the alpha into the selection box then inverse your selection... then gaussian blur your image and you'll get something where only the foreground is in focus... better yet... radial blur it! neat, eh? Well that's what I did with my evening last night... for added cool you can change the levels (brightness&contrast) on your alpha channel before selecting it and that will change how in/out of focus the different elements are! Now how is that for digital imaging wizardry? hehehe... I love photoshop.

Rediscover what I've been trying to figure out... Some one posted this technique a while ago, but I couldn't get it right. You mentioned a few things I forgot... like exporting the pic as a TIFF! Thanks!

You know, I don't think I've ever used depth-cue, although I do remember a discussion about it a while ago. Many thanks for posting this and teaching me something new. (Now guess how I'm gonna be spending the evening?) Paul

I bet animating with the depth cue would be interesting as well.