Photo Tricks- Focus the “focus” of your image!

You are on your way back home and suddenly you see a beautiful flower among others in a garden. You take your camera out. It does not matter whether you have a mobile phone integrated camera or expensive DSLR because the flower is beautiful and you want take a picture of it. You shoot it and later realize that you meant to focus on the particular flower rather than whole garden. And also you realize that the flower too is not looking so attractive. 

Here is a quick way to come around those problems on taken photos and make them more pleasing to look. This is a simple trick anyone can do with editing softwares such as Adobe Photo-shop or Gimp Image Editor. In this tutorial I am going to use Gimp because its free(download) and anyone can enjoy it. 

Steps:

one:

Take any of your pictures and open it in Gimp.

Two:

Select “Ellipse Select Tool” or “Rectangle Select Tool” from the Toolbox.

Three:

Select the region you want to highlight or focus on.

Four:

Go to “Select” on Menu Bar and click “Invert”, now all the other region except the one you wanted highlighted should be selected.

Five:

Go to “Filters” on Menu Bar and choose “Gaussian Blur” inside “Blur”.

Six:

A window will appear showing you configuration for your “Gaussian Blur”. “Blur Radius” will give you horizontal and vertical blur radius to choose from. Usually you should try and experiment for the exact radius that will match your picture. But average from 5-20px should do fine(larger the pixel size, larger the blur). Other option is to choose IIR(Infinite Impulse Response) or RLE(Run-Length Encoding). IIR is basically for non-computer generated images where RLE is for computer generated images. Once you are done, click “OK” .

Seven:

Then you should see the region you did not want to focus getting blurred. However, the region you wanted to focus is clear as it was. 

Examples: 

Remember: Do not use big pixel size for Blur Radius, as it may show clear use of blur and differentiate the blurred and non-blurred part of the image. And you can experiment with these tool as you may see fit.