From the course: Photoshop CS5 One-on-One: Advanced

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Masking a layer of Lens Blur

Masking a layer of Lens Blur - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop CS5 One-on-One: Advanced

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Masking a layer of Lens Blur

In this exercise, I'm going to show you the best way to go about masking this Lens Blur effect. So we cover up just the most egregious regions of noise in that out-of-focus background. I've gone ahead and saved my progress so far as My blurry butterfly.psd, found inside the 16_smooth folder. Now currently, the lens blur layer covers up the entire image. I don't want that by a mile because after all, most of the image is just fine the way it is. It's just this area in front of the butterfly's face and down here on the lower left corner. Those are the only areas that suffer from these random noise particles, everywhere else looks pretty good. So mostly, I don't want this lens blur layer. That means, instead of adding a White layer mask, which would reveal everything, and you get a White layer mask by clicking on the Add layer mask icon, down here at the bottom of the panel. Rather, I want to add a Black layer mask that hides everything, and you get such a mask by Alt+Clicking or Option+…

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