Thanks Klaus. The pass is made in TG, so produces a greyscale, where the close up parts are white (in short). So the stems of some plants are white with the background being dark. If I use this to soften the back area, the stems' edges somehow produce a serrated soft/not-soft area, because of the sharpness of the contrast. Hard to explain. One thing I could do is blur the whole pass a bit and increase gamma, so the stems are slightly wider white, so to speak. I will try that one of these days.
The people are better than I used to do, but not good enough. You can make more definition in DAZ in muscles, and also work on the model afterwards in ZB, or use better bumpmaps, but I'm a very impatient guy, and don't want to spend all my time on one thing. There's just too much I want to pursue.
@ Kadri: no, this is not the TG DOF. If there weren't this GISD/DOF probem I'd probably go for that instead.