30 Minutes with Photoshop

I have a desk­top wid­get that acts as a sideshows photo frame on my devel­op­ment machine. Hav­ing some­thing pleas­ant to stare at when my mind goes blank on a prob­lem is nice.

This morn­ing, dur­ing a par­tic­u­larly intense “now how the hell is that sup­posed to work” spell the photo below came up.

fish foun­tain in Oaxaca

Click on the photo to see a much big­ger ver­sion of the original.

I like the photo but it was taken with my lit­tle point and shoot and has way too much depth of field. I really don’t need to be able to iden­tify the make and model of the cars in the back ground. So I loaded it into Pho­to­shop and spent half and hour or so mak­ing a quick and dirty improve­ment. A lit­tle selec­tive select­ing and copy­ing. Then a cou­ple of rounds with the blur fil­ter and I got this.

a nicer ver­sion of the Fish Foun­tain photo

Again click on the photo for a much larger ver­sion. Don’t look too closely though. The illu­sion of shal­lower depth of field works fine in the 400 X 300 pixel ver­sion above but you can see the seams between the lay­ers and some other arti­facts in the larger ver­sion. Still for half an hour of futz­ing around I ended up with a much nicer photo to use on a web page.