Softening with the Blur Tool in Photoshop

Adding a little blur here and there can save an image with a few defects. Blurring can also be used for artistic effect — say to add a little motion to a soccer ball frozen in time by too-fast a shutter speed. The Photoshop Blur tool makes painting your blur effects exactly where you want them easy. The Blur tool doesn’t push pixels around like the Smudge tool. Instead, the Blur tool decreases the contrast among adjacent pixels in the area painted. The Blur tool is a good choice for softening edges or removing small defects. However, the mechanics of using the Blur tool and several of its options are similar to those of the Smudge tool. Just follow these steps:
1. Open an image and choose the Blur tool from the Tools palette.
Press the R key to select it if it happens to be the active focus tool, or press Shift+R to cycle through the Sharpen and Smudge tools until the Blur tool is active.
2. Select a brush from the Brushes palette.
Use a small brush for applying small areas of blur. Use larger brushes with caution, say, to blur the entire backgrounds to make a foreground object appear sharper in comparison.
3. Choose a blending mode from the Mode pop-up menu.
4. Choose the strength of the blurring effect with the Strength slider or text box.
5. If your image has multiple layers, you can select the Use All Layers option to blur based on the pixel information in all visible layers in your image.
This can produce a smoother blur when you merge the layers later.
6. Paint over the areas you want to blur.
7. When you finish, choose File-->Save to store your image.