3 ways to create the Orton Effect in Photoshop

the orton effect was created or invented by photographer michael Orton back in the 70s or 80s I'm not sure which it was a technique we're using transparency film he would create these kind of dreamy images in his effort to simulate watercolor paintings to create the Orton effect Michael Orton would set his camera up on a tripod and compose his image using transparency film he would over expose a shot I'm not sure how much I suppose it depended on the scene and subject matter he would take a second identical shot but this time he would move the lens out of focus so the image is quite blurry he would then stack those two transparencies on top of each other so the final effect would be an image of somewhat normal density with all of the a lot of the detail of the sharp slide showing through but adding a semester called glow from the blurry slide and it was a real effective technique and he became quite famous for it during the evolution of digital photography we have tried to replicate many of the techniques that we used when shooting film or in a dark room and the Orton effect is no exception I'm going to show three different ways to replicate or simulate the Orton effect the first way is the most common method I see taught through the internet and other places and it's a very effective way to simulate the Orton effect the second way of that I'm going to show is a little bit of a modification of another method that I found and I like this one because it's very very subtle you will might not even be able to see it on the screen that well and the final method is something that I don't think anybody's ever shown and so I've kind of nicknamed it the Wayne Fox method of the Orton effect and to me it replicates the original technique the closest because I'm actually starting with RAW files and I'm manipulating the images similar to what would be going on in the camera it has the added benefit of being very non-destructive and completely editable so you can tweak all of your various settings until you get a result that you'd like before you commit them let me mention that because this is very subtle and when you shrink a video like this down mo most of the effect will disappear so I recorded this video in 1080 high-def you might want to set your stream up to that high and go fullscreen or at least get a large enough window so you can really see what's going on so here we go with the first method of the Orton effect before beginning it's important that you have a single layer with all the information if you have a single layer file like this then you're good to go if you happen to have a file with multiple layers let's put a couple of fake layers in here you either need to flatten the file or you need to create what's called a stamp copy if you want to preserve these other layers then to create a stamp copy you'll click on the top layer hold down shift option command if you're on a Mac or shift alt ctrl if you're on a PC and hit the letter E now this layer here has all of the information of all the other layers merged into one I'm going to use my history to go back and eliminate those since I don't need them so the first thing we need to do is make a copy of this base layer and I'm going to do that wait in command J I want to keep this layer as it is for blending purposes later on so we always want the original to be untouched I need to make this layer a screen version but it has to be in normal blending mode most videos I've seen talk about using apply image to do that so I'll show that let's call this layer base so we have an idea which one it is and to do apply image you will go over here into the image menu select apply image it's important that you select the same layer as the base layer here sometimes it won't make a difference sometimes it will and then you also need to make sure you select screen mode from this blending I hit OK so that's one way to do it as you can see now I have a layer it's a normal mode and yet it's a screen version of the original I'm going to hit command Z because I think an easier way to do that is just hit command J change the blending mode to screen and then hit command E or ctrl E to merge that down and now I have the exact same thing with just a couple of keystrokes once I've done that I need to make a copy of this layer so I'm going to command J or ctrl J I'm going to call this layer or blur layer because it's the one we're going to blur so now what you see is I have two layers that are both lighter than the original just like the transparencies that Michael lerton shot now to make things clearer I'm going to take these two layers and I'm going to use the menu here to create a new group from layers and the reason I use the menu is because I want to give it a name quickly so now this is our Orton effect layer and we can turn it off and on once we're done or we can even fade it with the opacity slider we're ready to do our blur now and to do that I'm going to go ahead and blend my two slides together first so I can preview the effect so I'm gonna hit multiply you'll notice it adds quite a bit of contrast and now we're ready to blur this layer we're going to go filter blur Gaussian blur the small window up here shows the effect of just the blurred layer and it gives you an idea how much you're blurring that original layer okay the larger window of course previews the overall effect I would recommend you set the larger window to 50% if you're on a normal resolution monitor if you're on a high resolution monitor such as a 4k monitor or a Retina display you might want to set this at a hundred percent because this really gives you an idea what it will look like when it's printed a lot of times you want to use a fairly exaggerated effect I usually watch this window to make sure there's at least a little bit of detail and I'm not smearing it too badly but I want it to be pretty strong and then I can blend some of it back out later so that's one reason that doing this digitally is kind of cool we have some controls that Michael Orton didn't have with the film that looks pretty good so let's hit OK and now we've created our Orton effect and as I said if you think it's a little too strong we can take the overall grouping and then pull the opacity down to blend it back into the original you know so you can pull it back so it's very subtle let's go to 50% so you can see a little bit better you can get it so it's very very subtle or you can leave it very strong similar to what Michael orden achieve with transparency film so that's a method one of the Orton effect now another advantage we have because it's digital as we can selectively remove the effect from parts of the image and after I show the third method I'll show a couple of ideas on things you might try to do that method two is a more subtle than the other method and it's probably not a true representative and I'm going to rename it to screen now this method requires the background to remain because the layers above all effect all the way down through the background let's put those two in a grouping again and we need to change the blur layer to multiply and the screen layer to screen this will normally let's turn the original off here this normally will make the image appear a little bit lighter and so a lot of times the screen layer you're going to want to pull the opacity down just a little bit whoops there we go that's pretty close to zero and 70 to 75% somewhere there now that we've done that we want to select our blur layer and we're ready to hit filter blur Gaussian blur and again here in this window we can preview the effect of just the blur layer and again I recommend you zoom in to 50% on a normal display or 100% on a high-resolution display so you can preview the overall image and you can see this method is much more subtle and a lot of times you'll have to dial this blur up quite a bit higher than you did on the other method so let's go let's go about Wow 20 and maybe 30 that's close enough and now if we turn this layer back off and on you'll see how very very subtle it is and sometimes that's useful because you just want a real subtle approach you can vary the overall density of the image by tweaking the screen layer opacity and of course you can also blend some of the effect back out by tweaking the opacity of the - of the grouping normally this method is so subtle that you're not going to take much of it out so that's method 2 of the Orton effect method 3 of the Orton effect is something that I've never seen taught I've nicknamed it the Wayne Fox method of the Orton effect I don't know if anybody else has ever taught it but I believe it has some advantages over the other - normally to do this effect you'll start with your raw file and all the modifications that you've made in Lightroom it also works with TIFF and JPEG files as well I just because I'm trying to duplicate a film technique I think starting with the raw file is kind of cool so we're going to take this image over because because the one we was just working with was not a raw file it was actually a panorama merge so we're going to go here and we're going to edit in Photoshop but we're going to open it as a smart object in Photoshop the advantage of opening it as a smart object is it's still a raw file and that means we can double-click the smart object and it will open in Adobe Camera Raw and all of the settings that we've done in Lightroom can be reapplied to the raw image data itself and that's a feature that we're going to take advantage of so the first thing we need to do is make a copy of the raw file but we have to make it a little different way because if we just hit command or control J those two copies will be linked so we need to make a different make it a different way and the easiest way to do that is just to right click and then go new smart object via copy this means that these two copies are not independent of each other we're going to call this one our base now we need a copy of this layer and this time we can do command J because one of the things you want to do is both of these files will synchronize with all the changes that we make and this layer of course ends up becoming our blur we're going to put these two in a grouping again and we'll call this Wayne Fox Orton and we're going to double click one of these two layers and we're going to over expose our image now the amount you need to overexpose varies we're going to over expose this particular image one stop the cool part is is that you can keep changing your exposure until you get it to where you like it because all of the things we're doing now are non-destructive now notice as we do that that both of these two copies lightened so we now have an image that is a stop lighter but it's not a screen mode image it's our raw file and that exposure adjustment was made similar to opening the lens up and shooting it overexposed so we need to turn this top layer to multiply and now we're ready to blur this layer filter blur Gaussian blur and again this window is showing us the effect on the layer that we're on and you'll notice it doesn't take a lot of blur to get this image pretty blurry and we'll zoom in here again to 50% and this image previews the effect in the overall image now the results of this one are similar to the first method but I think it's a little bit more accurate and I think it duplicates the original ordinate the closest so in this case I only need a blur of about seven or eight I don't need to go very high I could go quite high and exaggerate it but you'll see how that's bleeding in too much and that's what I watch for i watch for the color bleeding into parts that i want to come I believe leap pure so I'm going to go about there 9.5 is fine and now we have our Orton effect done this is before and after and let's go ahead and zoom back out a little bit and let's go before and after so now that we've done that you can see that there's a couple of cool things we can do first of all we can decide that our densities off a little bit and we literally can just double click one of these two smart objects and add or subtract a little bit more density the other thing that I usually do with this method which i think is pretty cool is when I go into here I'll normally pull the whites down and the blacks up a little bit and that will reduce some of the dark spots and make the contrast a little bit more pleasant I can even get very extreme in that if I want it's hard to preview in this image but I can pull my shadows up quite a bit and my blacks up a little more and hit OK and you'll see how the shadow is lightened up there's before and there's after so because I can tweak the raw file it's as though I shot it differently which is really really cool it's as though you could change your transparency settings on the fly when you were shooting it with film the other thing I can do is I can change the amount of blur I can reduce the blur or increase it so this this method is very very non-destructive and allows me to tweak it and I can either tweak it till I like it and then flatten the image or I can save it in this state so I can always make a change later so that's one reason I like this particular way to do the Orton effect because of all the changes now if you're using one of the other methods you can also convert your layers to smart objects before you apply changes such as the Gaussian blur and that will allow you to also redo the blur later if you want so that's the wing fox method of the Orton effect so with most images you're going to really want to remove part of the Orton effect from some of the image one of the nice things we have about doing digital and I would guess a lot of the time it's just a matter of painting it out or using some simple masking techniques in Photoshop here I'll just add a mask I don't like what it's doing in this building so let me just go ahead and grab my brush and let's just paint it out very quickly all right I'll warn you that the brush the circle doesn't show the actual edge of your feather you can see that I've got a feather it's the middle of the transition so you kinda have to take that in mind of course in this case if I get a little bit into the trees that won't hurt anything so just to give you a quick idea let's zoom in here and you can see that with the Orton effect off we have a much sharper more detailed shot of the building and yet down in the the Christmas lights and the water we're able to maintain that Orton effect this isn't affecting it much and I would need to be more careful and you can see that I needed some of the building I would have to paint more but I just wanted to show a quick demo so that's the most common way you're going to do it I wanted to show two techniques I use which are maybe something that you haven't seen before because I found them to be very effective in removing especially for the Orton effect and this image lets me demonstrate both of those first of all in this image I would prefer the shadows to not lose as much detail to me the Orton effect is about the light light part of the images seeming to glow as though they're glowing with light and the shadows I would prefer to have a little less of that effect going on and I also would prefer to see the detail of the trunks of these trees show through either all the way or at least a lot more so they're two technique so I can do to accomplish that and they're actually easier than you would think the first thing we're going to do is we're going to apply a luminosity mask to our Orton effect and that will allow us to remove it from any basically any brightness level of the image in this case we want to get the darkest darks so I'm going to go to my channels palette I'm going to ctrl or command click on the RGB channel and you'll see that I have a selection now the selection is based on the brightness values of the pixels and it's probably the upper 20% if I hold shift and then command or control each time it will add a level further so that's you know 40 percent 60 percent 80 percent and now I've been to got the dark pixels are excluded if I go back to my layers palette now and I go to my Orton method and I just hit my mask icon you'll see that I have this really cool mask that's not pure black but it's based on the darkness of the pixels and it effectively took the effect out of the darkest part of the image now in this case I think it didn't go quite far enough so I'm going to delete it and I recommend when you're doing this you actually count your number of click so if you want to do it again you can just go one more click so we're going to click once twice three times four times five times I think last time I only click four and maybe I'll go one more click so I'm really going to only affect the darkest parts of the image here go to an art method layer and now you can see that it's really affected just the shadows now maybe it's affected them too much and that's fine because all you got to do is go to your properties of your mask and pull that density down a little bit and you can pull it back and you can really have a lot of fine control so that's how I take care of the shadows the tree trunks are a little different and you know you might have an image where you've got some very light areas that you want to pull the detail back in let's just let me just turn it off and on and to do that I would use a technique called I would use the Select by color range option I need to make sure that I have a normal layer selected and I will click somewhere in these trees I'm going to turn the quick mask off click somewhere in the whites of the trunks I'm going to turn my plus dropper on I easier they're holding shift and I'm going to start clicking and sampling a lot of these areas in this particular image I it's nice because there really are no color similar to these trunks anywhere else in the image and so it's actually pretty easy to isolate these tree trunks I usually will grab the quick mask and look because that really helps you understand what you've got selected and this looks pretty good that's where I want the detail to come back through so I'm just going to hit OK and go to my mask I want to make sure that I have some feather in this so you need to select your rectangle marquee and then make sure your feathers you know somewhere between 5 and 15 depending on how high resolution the file is because we don't want this hard edge once we do that make sure our mask is selected and we just fill it with black or if you want to use less you can apply an 80% gray or 70% gray if you want it to be not 100% you can just put in a different level of grey so this is before this is after let's go back before after let me zoom in here before after so now my trees pretty much look like the original shot and yet I've got this really nice Orton effect going on only affecting that kind of parts the image I would like to glow so those are two techniques that are very very useful to help you blend out part of the luminosity mask obviously you can use any of the masking capabilities of Photoshop to do this the key point is most the time it's nice to pull some of that back out thanks for listening to the video I hope that you'll find the Wayne Fox method of the Orton effect effective I think it is by far the most useful and powerful because it is so controllable and editable and until next time thanks you

Channel: Wayne Fox

Views: 40,891

Keywords: Photohsop, digital imaging, orton effect, soft focus

Id: onYXOkzs8vA

Length: 23min 22sec (1402 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 01 2016