hey its me, most of you know me as nogoodsk8rpunk. my name however is matt. i have a question/request. as you may find i believe that i do a decent job at lighting effects in my work mainly night shots. i'm having trouble w/ a piece of art, for a future entry. w/o telling you the entry so as not to give it away i have split the image apart and want one section to apear farther away. but so far it looks a tad bit off i have the shadows where i want them but the piece is just not right. the piece is smaller and to the top left but with a mainly white background its throwing me off so i don't know how to get help can some one point me to a site/example w/o me having to reveal my project.

thanks,
-m- N.G.S.P.

a lot of the time when we get stuck or think something looks wrong on a future entry, we send it to someone who is experienced with the particular problem on the site or just a friend. I'm sure someone here will take a look at it if you pm the entry to them and and give you some help with it. I wouldn't recommend myself as I've never had much luck in the area

YOu named the thread as Depth of field. Most people here will understand this as DOF in photographic terms which actualy means that objects closer and farther of you main object lost focus for some degree. Therefore artificial depth of field is acchieved by using gaussian blur on particular part of image.

If you realy want to create like distance between objects by shrinking part of image which you want to be farther and therefore smaller , then you will probably lost some background on the borders (if you shrink the full width of the image) . Clone tool or some external background could help to fill the gaps. Other way ids to make closer objects larger.

Just my two cents if I understand your problem well.

hard to tell without seeing the pic for sure...

if i'm getting this right.. then a possible solution could be

duplicate the layer (or the full result), blur it a bit, and mask the parts you want to be out of focus. the mask can use gradients,or use soft brushes to have fluid transitions from sharp to out of focus?

Catch my drift?

very, very basic example
http://davidtony.net/tony/dof.gif

also desaturataion and lightening

thanks guys for viewing this forum also i have tried most of these techs so for those of you that have pm'd me i'll work on sending that over to you and you can see what i'm talking about. thanks.
-matt-