Elements 5 blur help

[FrankS]

Is there a way to blur an area of an image in a way that the edge of the blur is gradual instead of abrupt? (Elements 5)

I upgraded from Elements 2 recently: where are the dodge and burn tools in Elements 5?

 

[Kin Lau]

Is there a way to blur an area of an image in a way that the edge of the blur is gradual instead of abrupt? (Elements 5)

I upgraded from Elements 2 recently: where are the dodge and burn tools in Elements 5?

For the 1st question, select a brush that has blurred edges instead of a hard brush.

I don't have my PSE 5.0 with me now, but I think dodge & burn should be on the toolbar near the bottom.

 

[Kin Lau]

I don't have my PSE 5.0 with me now, but I think dodge & burn should be on the toolbar near the bottom.

I just checked... it's the very last icon on the toolbar, the "sponge" tool. You'll see that there's 3 options, sponge, dodge and burn. You can either click & hold to see all three, or look up at the top.

 

[FrankS]

Thank you Kin. I found it hiding under the sponge!

 

[Eryximachos]

FrankS: I do that by making a selection of the area to be blurred (lasso tool or whatever). Then on the pull-down menus I go to Selection and Feather. This modified the selected area. (Experiment with different numbers for the feathering effect, starting with 20 pixels or so.) Then execute the Blur command and see how it looks. The edges of the blurred area should be 'feathered'. If the boundary between blur and not-blurred still looks abrupt, increase the amount of feathering. This is probably not the texttbook "correct" solution but it works well enough for my artistic aspirations.

 

[FrankS]

FrankS: I do that by making a selection of the area to be blurred (lasso tool or whatever). Then on the pull-down menus I go to Selection and Feather. This modified the selected area. (Experiment with different numbers for the feathering effect, starting with 20 pixels or so.) Then execute the Blur command and see how it looks. The edges of the blurred area should be 'feathered'. If the boundary between blur and not-blurred still looks abrupt, increase the amount of feathering. This is probably not the texttbook "correct" solution but it works well enough for my artistic aspirations.

Thank you for this!