FOCUSING ATTENTION BY ADDING DEPTH

Here's a trick for defining depth to the viewer of your artwork: Make the objects that are farther away appear out of focus or blurry, and the objects that are near, sharp and crisp. You can use this technique for drawing attention to objects in the foreground of your Photoshop image by slightly blurring the background. This adds depth and dimension to your artwork, as well as focusing attention. To do this, put a selection around the area you want the focus, add a 10-pixel Feather (Option-Command-D/Alt-Control-D), Inverse the selection (from the Select menu or Shift-Command-I/Shift-Control-I), then apply your Blur (Filter>Blur>Gaussian).