Photoshop, I'll reckon. Could also be a lens with soft focus effect or softener filter attached, but since part of the background is still sharp (the water drainage grilles) I don't think those were used. atwl
Think it could be photoshop.. look near the legs.. looks like someone used the brush around it. Either that or it could just be JPEG compression. Maybe we should take into account the material worn and how reflective it is?
Well photoshop blur alone won't do the trick, I had to use dual layer and filters and manually erase some part...(too much work) and may not produce the effects correctly.
Ok, taking u guys' advise i did an experiment. But I still dun quite get the effect I wanted....hmmn maybe the pic is not good to bein wif.
Try the Soft Edge Glow technique - using Gaussian blur on a duplicate top layer at... maybe... 3-5 pixel strength, set that layer to Lighten mode, then add a Layer Mask to selectively apply the effect to the whole image. atwl
Actually that's similar to what I did....only I darken the bottom layer so it won't lighten overall and a third layer on top to show the part I want to be clear. Also I used despeckle to smooth the face a bit.
Yeah that's exactly what I was talking about... plus I also mentioned using layer mask to selectively apply the effect to only specific parts of the picture. atwl
Part of the problem with the post-processing is that we're working with an already sharpened and downscaled-for-web image whereas the photographer in the sample picture is probably working with the original high res image. This is what I could get working on such a small picture. atwl