Fake It Til You Make It

In honor of Kelsey's senior pictures today, I thought I'd talk a little bit about how you can FAKE the look of a DSLR camera in Photoshop. One of the nice things about a DSLR camera is that you can produce pictures where the subject is in focus, and the background is slightly out of focus. Typically, that's difficult to do with a normal digital camera, but if you have photoshop, you can fake it!

For example, here's a picture of Renee and I goofing off straight out of the camera:
Pretty decent, but not entirely focused on Renee and me (and that's even grammatically correct people!).You can still see the branches in the background and what not, and I think that the entire focus should be on her and I being dorks. So, here's the "fake DSLR" picture:
See the difference? It's pretty subtle, but still brings the focus to us and our goofiness. It's super easy to do--basically, you just open up a picture, duplicate the whole layer, and add gaussian blur to the duplicate layer. That will make the whole picture blurry. Next, you 'll add a layer mask, and then in the layer mask start painting anything you don't want blurred black. Abracadabra, it will de-blur. Don't worry about being too careful because if you de-blur something you want to be blurred, you can just paint it white, and it will re-blur. Nifty, huh? If you're one of those people who needs screen caps and such to follow along with, Pioneer Woman has a pretty detailed explanation of the technique.