>>2222456This example is a little tricky due to the stars, but here's my take. My process is first to change the color mode to RGB 16 bit, this gives us more colors to play with for smoother gradients. Then select out the stars and subject so I just have the area I want to blur. Delete the stars+subject in a new layer so that we don't get leakage of unwanted colors when we blur. I applied gaussian blur at around 20 px and put the masked original pic on the top layer. The interesting thing is that if we wanted to we could actually convert back to RGB 8 bit and some noise would be automatically added in to fix some banding, which is perfect because the 16bit version exceeded post limit size. You can still kind of see some banding around the stars which some manual touchup would fix but it's definitely a lot better than before.
