Frustrated. Is There a Mac Program That Can Do This?

ok im a total novice when it comes to photoshop so if u can do something like this on photoshop please let me know b/c i actually have photoshop on my mac osx ...

ok now on to my question.

i used to be a PC user and one of the photo programs i liked was Kai Photo Soap because it allowed you to "paint on" the filter effects, u could choose the size of your brush and you could basically paint on sharpness to a certain area of the photo, or paint on certain color changes...paint on brightness changes, paint on the blur tool and different gradients of blur tool to make skin flawless, etc.

pls see the image below


unfortunately kai stopped making this program and the newest one that is available for mac is 2.5 which is only compatible with the older mac systems...

is there any mac program that will perform the duties that i just specified??

Yes. It's called Photoshop.

What you need to do is to use the Quick Mask Tool.

On the tools pallet select the Quick Mask Tool which is the 2nd icon from the bottom, the one that looks like a circle in a rectangle. Then select the paintbrush (you'll notice that your colour pallet has changed to Black & White). With the colour black selected paint over any areas that you DON'T want a filter applied to. If you make a mistake, switch to white and paint it back in. Once you've made your selection then press the Quick Mask Tool again and you've made a selection. You can now apply your filter to just that selection.

HTH

or if you want to be able to quickly edit the areas where you apply the filter, you can duplicate or jump the whole layer, then apply the filter to the new layer and mask that, this way you can easily go back at any time to change the areas affected by a filter