Background Blurring to Simulate Shallow Depth of Field

[bart_hickman]

This tutorial will describe how to blur the background in an image to make it appear as though it was shot with a shallower depth of field than it actually was. This can help a subject stand out more and make the background less distracting. The technique is especially useful for images shot with small sensor P&S cameras which inherently have large depth of field and have no way of getting shallow DOF.

This particular tutorial focuses more on what to extract and how to do the blurring and less on the particular extraction method (which can be the subject of another tutorial). [details]