Now, I’m going to walk you through blurring the background in a simple but effective manner. This is actually something I don’t like doing because it’s hard to make it look realistic. I see a lot of people overdo this effect too, and it makes the photo hard to look at. Especially when they overblur something in the foreground, which should be more in focus than the background.

Sometimes I’ll do this if my background is extremely messy, though. This is the case in this photo, where you can see my face-up materials on the desk. I want it to be less noticeable.

For the record, I already sharpened this photo. You can look back at the first tutorial if you want to know how. Here, I am duplicating the layer so that I can spotclean later. It’ll make more sense when we get to that.

Using Quick Mask once again, I fill in the layer with opaque black.

Using the white, soft, large, translucent brush I paint the background but leave the foreground untouched.

Get out of Quick Mask Mode when you’re done.

I prefer Gaussian Blur for this.

Once again, I just messed with the settings until I found something I liked.

After that, I took a large, soft eraser and cleaned up the edges on the foreground that have been overly softened. By erasing, the sharpened layer below shows through the blurred layer. This is why I duplicated the layers earlier.

The finished product, which makes the foreground more eyecatching. Now hopefully no one will notice my messy desk. :)