| PaintShop Photo Pro X3 for Photographers Step-by-Step Projects Technique: Creating an Artificial Point of Focus Because life is never straightforward, PaintShop Photo Pro has a Freehand selection tool. This is used to manually draw around an object for the purpose of isolating it from the rest of the picture. While this can be the most accurate of all the selection tools, it can also be the most tricky because you have to rely on the accuracy of the mouse, which is a bit like drawing with a bar of soap at the best of times. This project shows you how to achieve an artificially narrow depth-of-field effect using freehand selections and the Gaussian Blur filter. PaintShop Photo Pro X3 has a depth-of-field effect that can achieve something similar quickly and with much less effort. Doing it this way takes longer and it's trickier, but the accurate selections you make will produce a more realistic effect ­ one that looks like it was produced in the camera, rather than with software. As with all tools, the Freehand selection tool comes with a wide range of