To focus attention on a particular part of your image, one of the easiest technqiues is to blur the rest of it. There's several different ways to accomplish the same effect, so I'll just show two of the fastest.

I'm starting with this parade image from stockxchange.com, a very busy scene with a little too much to look at:

For the first step, I just duplicated the layer by pressing +, then added a Motion Blur (Filters>Blur>Motion Blur) with a setting of about 18 and an angle of 7 to the Background copy.

Now you can take off in several different directions.

One way is open the History palette and click the little icon area beside the step you want to go back to.

Here, I'm targeting the Duplicate Layer step, just before I added the Motion Blur:

This tells the History brush (the next step...) to paint back to this particular place in your history.

So, with the History brush selected from the toolbar, simply paint back the part of the image you want to focus on.

I painted back the girl with the large melons (...IN HER HAT!!):

The second quick-&-easy way to do this is to use a layer mask.

(Photoshop Elements users:Click over to the Graffishop and grab Graffi's Handy Actions. One of the Handy Actions is a Layer Mask - and there are many more additional handy actions that add a bit of Photoshop functionality to your Elements installation.)

On the Background copy layer, click the "Create a Mask" icon (second from the left on the bottom of the palette). You'll get a mask thumbnail beside the layer thuumbnail filled with white.

Now choose a soft-edged brush and paint away the blur, just like you did for the History brush technique.

An additional advantage of using a mask is that you can then run a filter on it.

I clicked the mask thumbnail to make it active, then just pressed [Ctrl]+[F] a few times to rerun the Motion Blur filter with the same settings as the first time, resulting in this final image: