I need help with doing 3 things on photoshop, can you help?

Question

1. How do you blur the background so that the focus is only on what it's meant to be?
2. I want to add an orange or green tint to all the photos (they're all in greyscale), how do I do this?
3. I know how to put things into greyscale by going into channels and selecting either red, blue or green; but how do you make one part of the picture the normal color, and the rest greyscale?

Answer 1

1. easiest solution is to mask out what should be in focus then invert the mask and blur it. use the lasso tool to start the mask then hit "q". everything outside of the mask will be red tinted and you can use the paintbrush tool to clean it up. hit "q" again and you will see your nice selection.

2. use a cool filter to tint your photo green or a warm filter to tint it orange. image>adjustments>photo filter

3. again make a mask then use your selection to greyscale part of the photograph.

Answer 2

there are several ways to do what your asking, you could select what you want to be blured and use the blur tool or a fillter. It may be better to split the photo into two layers and blur one. Layers are a good way to put a tint on parts of the photos as well. Create a copy of the layer for each color of tint then apply a tint to each layer using the color channels. You can then use a layer mask to hide different parts of each layer anf finally merge the visable layers into one layer so you can save it as a jpeg ect.

Answer 3

1)
The easiest would be to Duplicate you original layer
Use the Fileters to apply a blur
Add a layer mask (reveal all)
put the focus on the mask and paint black where ever you want to preserver detail.

2)
Add a Fill layer and pick a color....
Change the blending mode of the fill layer to soft light and change your fill percentage to suite

3)
Add a hue/saturation adjustment layer... Pull out all the saturation.
put the focus on the mask for this layer and fill it black.... now paint in white where you want grey scale....

you can play with the order of the layers for different effects

I have a similar effect here
http://www.syrusphotography.com/coppermine/displayimage.php?album=lastup&cat=9&pos=0