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Welcome to this lesson on Depth of Field. I'm going to discuss depth of field first before getting into how to emulate that in Paint Shop Pro because before I got a nice, digital, SLR camera and was able to learn how to use it, I didn't understand what depth of field was. So I hope by showing you how it exists in reality, you can decide how to create it in software much better. So here's a picture of Jake, my son. He's my second to the oldest child we have and my oldest son, Ben, is in the background and I am just to the side of the photo. You'll notice that Jacob is a very nice photo and he is perfectly in focus, but just a few feet behind him, Ben is not in focus and you can even see where I am starting to become not in focus as well. This is a result of depth of field effect, which is caused by the combination of the lens and the lens focal length and the aperture setting that you have in your camera. Now, I'm not going to get too technical but I want to just discuss this briefly. Smaller apertures let in less light and the aperture is the physical opening in the lens that lets light in to the digital sensor. Smaller apertures let in less light but have a larger depth of field. So if I go to a different photo, let's say of this P-51 Mustang, I'm quite a distance away from the aircraft and I'm quite a distance away from the tree line. But you'll notice that the aircraft is in pretty good focus and even the trees back here are not in bad focus. That is a very deep depth of field, which essentially means from foreground to background, things are in focus. This had a smaller aperture. Now, that aperture is reflected in the camera by the F number which is the opposite of the aperture. Smaller apertures have higher F numbers and larger apertures have smaller F numbers. So this aperture was smaller, let in less light, but the F number was larger, like F 22. Here we have a case where the aperture was larger and let in more light, which results in a shallower depth of field so Jacob is in focus but Ben, just two feet behind him, is out of focus. This aperture was larger but the F number was probably about F 4. So when you're creating depth of field effects in Paint Shop Pro, essentially what you're doing is you are blurring the background. It's about as simple as that. You're blurring the background to create this large aperture effect in, which occurs in the camera. I'm going to close those out and grab another picture of Jacob in the basement. Here we have, Jacob's in focus and basically most other things are too. So the F number in this photograph was different than the last one of him because it has a deeper depth of field. But you can see it's a bunch of just stuff in the basement and toys and shelves and things and, you know, blurring this out might actually make the photograph look better. So we are going to go to the Adjust Menu, Depth of Field. That brings up the Depth of Field dialog box. I can quickly grab it and bring it over here. Yeah, there we go. Now I'll turn off the preview on the image since I maximized this. The depth of field, again, is trying to simulate what you saw as a reflection of the camera. It's trying to simulate that in software. So what we do is identify an area of focus through one of these Selection Tools and here we have just a Circular Selection Tool. I'm going to click on Jacob's face and drag outwards to identify the area of focus and it can be large or small. It can be somewhat irregularly shaped if you want to use the Freehand Tool or it can be even rectangular. I can also invert this so that then what you selected becomes blurred and everything else becomes sharp, or at least not blurred. The Blur Setting identifies how much blur you want in the out-of-focus area. And 20 looks pretty good to me. Things are blurrier. You can discernibly tell that. Aperture shape is circular or hexagonal. That's just kind of a way to emulate different cameras and the lenses. Areas of Focus Adjustment here; you've got Feathering the Edge so I can increase that to smooth the transition between blur and not blurred and I can also adjust the focus range by increase the focus range so I'm pushing what's going to be in focus, I'm pushing that outwards. OK? And I'm going to reduce that feathered area a little bit. So the mechanics of this are fairly simple. You select an area that you want to be in focus, decide how much you want the blur to be, make aperture shape decisions and then decide how much to feather and whether or not you need to push focus from the center out. Just press OK and we can see the result here. That's not bad. Jacob's face is clearly in focus and everything else is being blurred. And that emulates the depth of field effect.