Make Background Blur - With Photoshop 7.0

Written by: Chandra R (chan8lus@cbn.net.id)
For users of digital cameras, especially consumer class, where the camera uses a smaller sensor and lens length are limited, it is difficult to obtain a shallow DOF, so the background looks blurry, which is often used to isolate / emphasize the object, prior to this class are generally camera automatic (Point & Shoot). With the help of Photoshop, things mentioned above is easy to do, here given a rather complicated way, so the result will be better:

1. Create a selection of tabs on the object that we want to keep sharp (most easily with Magnetic Lasso), to refine the selection results, click the select-feather (typing its value between 1-4) and select-Smooth (typing its value between 2-6).
2.   Create a new layer from selection TSB (layer via copy, Ctrl + J), hide this layer (layer1), clicking on the icon with his eye on the layers palette.
3. . Enable / select the background layer, use the smudge tool (located on the tool box, one group with Blur / Sharpen tool), do the withdrawal of all edge pixels around the object to the inside (toward the edge of the object), so quickly, select a brush size too big ill in diameter and enlarging the image in the display which is not too large (eg: the Hand Tool, select Fit on Screen); the purpose of using this tool, is not to be seen "hello" on the edge of the object, which is often seen when we use a simple way (selection object, select-inverse, gaussian blur).
4.   Then select Filter-Blur-Gaussian Blur, typing the value, depending on how we want to blur the background (generally a value between 60-10 is enough) ..
5. . Return back a new layer from selection (layer one) by clicking the eye icon in the palette back layersnya, we will see results, where the edge of the boundary of the object, not visible halo. When we feel less refined selection results, we can fix the first layer TSB, eg: the Eraser Tool, to remove excess selection we do.
6. Finally, keep (save) the results of our work, if we feel are satisfied and do not plan to edit it again, join TSB layers (flatten image), especially when the image is saved TSB in JPEG format.

Good luck.