Step 8: Add A Layer Mask

This part is optional. You may not need to touch up your blur effect, but if you do, make sure you still have "Layer 1" selected, then click on the Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers palette:

Nothing appears to have changed in the document window, but if we look at "Layer 1" in the Layers palette, we can see that we now have a layer mask thumbnail to the right of the layer's preview thumbnail:

Step 9: Select The Brush Tool

I'm going to paint away the blur effect from the side of the woman's face. For that, I'll need Photoshop's Brush Tool so I'll select it from the Tools palette. You can also access the Brush Tool simply by pressing the letter B on your keyboard:

Step 10: Set Your Foreground Color To Black

By default, whenever we have a layer mask selected, Photoshop sets our Foreground color to white and our Background color to black. To paint away the blur effect on "Layer 1", we need to paint with black, which means we need black as our Foreground color. Press the letter X on your keyboard to swap your Foreground and Background colors, making black the Foreground color and white the Background color. We can see what the colors are currently set to by looking at the two color swatches near the bottom of the Tools palette. The top left swatch is the current Foreground color and the bottom right swatch is the current Background color:

Step 11: Paint Away Any Unwanted Areas Of Blurring

With the Brush Tool selected and black as your Foreground color, simply paint over the areas where you want to remove the blur effect. In my case, I'm going to paint along the edge of the woman's face. You can adjust the size of the brush using the left and right bracket keys on your keyboard. The left bracket key makes the brush smaller while the right bracket key makes it larger. You can also adjust the edge hardness of the brush by holding down the Shift key and pressing the left and right bracket keys. Holding Shift while pressing the left bracket key makes the brush edges softer, and holding Shift while pressing the right bracket key makes the edges harder. I'm going to use a small brush with fairly hard edges and paint along the left side of the woman's face to remove the blurring:

If you make a mistake and accidentally paint over the wrong area, simply press X on your keyboard to switch your Foreground color to white and paint over the mistake, then press X again to switch back to black and continue painting away the blur effect.

I'll continue painting along the edge of her face to remove the last bit of blurring. If I look at the layer mask thumbnail in the Layers palette, I can see all the areas where I've painted with black to remove the blurring from the photo:

And here, after removing the blur effect from along the side of the woman's face so it contrasts nicely with the out-of-focus man's face behind her, is my final "depth of field" result:

And there we have it!

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