Focus Tools
Now focus your attention on the Focus tools. These tools, Blur and Sharpen, are great for touching up an image, fixing tiny flaws, and bringing items into sharper contrast. They can't save a really bad photo, but they can do wonders for one that's just a little bit off. Sharpen can increase the contrast to create the illusion of sharper focus, whereas Blur is most useful to rid the background of unwanted clutter and to deemphasize parts of the picture that you don't want viewers to notice. The Focus tools can be seen in Figure 9.4.
Figure 9.4. The Focus tools, with Smudge thrown in for good measure.
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The Blur Tool
The Blur tool, simply put, creates blurs in images. By blurs, I mean a softening or evening out of pixel values. Select the Blur tool from the toolbox. The Tool Options bar will show you the Blur tool's options (see Figure 9.5). When you are working with the Blur tool, you can temporarily select the Sharpen tool (and vice versa) by pressing Option (Mac) or Alt (Windows). The Sample All Layers option is available only when your image has more than one layer.
Figure 9.5. The Blur Tool Options bar.
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Figure 9.6. The Blur tool in use.
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Figure 9.7. Before blurring (top) and after (bottom).
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The Sharpen Tool
The Sharpen tool is the exact opposite of the Blur tool. Where the Blur tool softens pixel values, the Sharpen tool hardens them and brings them into greater relief by increasing the contrast between adjacent pixels. Because of their equal-but-opposite relationship, they share a space on the toolbox, with a pop-up that lets you choose either one, or the Smudge tool. You can also activate the Blur, Sharpen, and Smudge tools by pressing R (for retouching ?). Press Shift+R to toggle among the three. Figure 9.8 shows a dogwood blossom, before and after having its center sharpened.
Figure 9.8. Applying the Sharpen tool. Compare the area inside the circle to the same picture before sharpening.
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Figure 9.9. Too much sharpening.
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Try it YourselfUsing the Focus ToolsLet's take a quick break here and try out these tools. Open any convenient picture in Photoshop and follow these steps:
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