How Blurred Becomes Better
Much of our time and effort as photographers is to get the focus justright. We welcome innovations such as autofocus
and anti-shake mechanisms that help us get sharp images. Crisp focusing is so important that it seems contrary to a
photographer’s instincts to deliberately make a photo blurry and lessfocused. But blurs do have their place.
148 PART 3 HOW THE DIGITAL DARKROOM WORKS
Sometimes you want to hide things in a photo-
graph as much as you want to show other ele-
ments. For instance, the high level of detail gives
this photo a harsh appearance.1
Applying a slight blur gives you a
more aesthetically pleasing effect.2
There are many different ways
to apply a blur to a digital
photo, but all blur functions
recalculate the color value of a
particular pixel by averaging it
with the pixels around it. Of
course, if you averaged the
color of every pixel in the
entire photo, and applied it to
every pixel, our portrait would
look like the brown square to
the left.3