One photo effect that i love seeing and hope to learn once i get a new camera, is depth of field and bokeh effects. I think they really make the subject pop! But, fear not, if your camera cant do it, photoshop can!

This first image, is the origional photo ( with some further step layers hiden, ignore them for now). This photo of my son is one i love from around his first christmas. He was facinated by the tree! hed been crawling around in his diaper and i wanted  a picture of him in the santa hat but didnt really have the right outfit to go with it, so i creatively covered the diaper. This is a great moment, but not really a great shot.  the colors are all over the place. Sure it could be worse, but I think we can make it better. to start with , Duplicate your photo layer

Now on the Top photo layer, apply a  guassian blur ( filter>blur>guassian blur ) Set an ammount that blurs it about as much as you want your farthest point from your focal point to be.

.On the right side of the image,  on my layers palate at the bottom is a little square with a circle in the middle. thats the mask button. Use that to  apply a mask to the top photo layer, the one with the blur.

WIth the mask part of the blurred layer selected,  select your  gradiant tool.  Set your gradiant to foreground to transparent. In this case it should  look like black  fades to nothing, now, with the mask as the active layer,  draw your gradiant line from the area you want to be the sharpest, towards the area you want to be the most blurred.  Experiment with different line lengths and starting areas, till you are atleast mostly happy with the effect.

If there is an area that needs to be sharpened up a bit more,  you can  grab your  brush tool, and with a soft round brush, paint on your mask in black to mask out  a bit more of the blurred layer. i did this on the hat area of my photo and my sons shoulders, to make him pop a bit more from the background.

Now, this photo has improved regarding the depth of field,  but I want to really highlight that bow and hat. flatten your image and turn one of them black and white ( i used my better black and white photo action, that comes with my  grunged photo enhancements set ).

Drag the black and white photo, over the  color version. There are a few ways we can bring out the color of the hat and bow. You could simply carefully mask/erase the black and white part over the part you want to show, but since they are both a very similar color, we can do it pretty easily

Hide the black and white for now. You could go to select>color range and use the eye dropper tool by sliding over the red areas until it picks up the majority of them and then " select similar " or you could simply use your wand to select part of the area, and then select similar ( play with tolerance levels ). It really depends on your photo and how much contrast the area you want to keep colorized is compared to the  area surrounding it. I used  select similar, to get most of the red selected. ( you can see the select color range dialogue box in the following image )

then  unhide the black and white layer ( with the selection still around the red area ) and then delete that section of the black and white photo. the little bits that were left over i  erased with my eraser tool.

Here is my final image.  I hope you are able to apply some of the techniques we used in this tutorial, to your own ideas and photos