Cs4 hairline

Question

Good morning,
I have a photo of a lilly in a pond, I would like to give the perception of more depth so I tried a couple of ways to achieve this:
a) Duplicate pic, quick selection tool inverse delete, gausian blur on copy, my problem was that the lilly in the background (copy) blurred to much and spread.
b) Same as above except delete lily from background prior to blur, problem here is that I now have an open space between the background (blurred) and the forground lilly
I tried with the pen tool same as (b) with the same results??
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Tks Gary

Answer 1

You can easily achieve depth of field with masking.
Duplicate your layer.
Go to your bottom layer and gaussian blur  this to altaest the maximum amount of blur you need.
Go to your top layer and option click on the layer mask option. This will fill the layer mask with black hiding everyhting.
Choose a very large,  soft  white brush and paint in on the layer mask the areas you want sharp with white. You could also use the gradient tool instead for a smooth transition.