BETTER than an Orton Effect!

you've ever seen an amazing photograph and wondered how the heck did they get that look in their image now i can't speak for every photograph out there but i will tell you that many images in my portfolio go through this glowing kind of radiating effect now when done subtly it looks phenomenal if you overdo it it doesn't look that great other people might call this effect maybe an orton effect glow radiance bloom there's many different words for this i tend to just call it a glow or a radiance effect okay so i'm going to show you how you can make your own custom radiance effect it's kind of like building blocks now for me it doesn't matter what type of photography you do it could be portrait it could be landscape it could be architecture it could be product photography this is a technique that anyone can use to make their images look awesome because there's a very specific thing that this glow and radiance effect does that triggers the viewer's mind to go exactly where you want them to go the first thing i'm going to talk about though is where in your workflow do you want to use these glowing radiating effects now where i use this in my workflow you can see that i have quite a few layers here that are happening in this image that are creating this file now using my zone system express and palette effects and many other things that i've done to make this image this is all of the work that i did after adobe camera raw to get the look that i have here and this is where i would use that radiating effect now i'm going to show you the building blocks that i was talking about for this glowing effect and it's extremely simple what we're going to do is we're going to make a duplicate copy of our image we're going to blur it and then we're going to separate the tones and the colors and modify them independently of the blur itself sounds kind of confusing but it's very simple watch this so let's go ahead and minimize all my work here i'm going to press ctrl shift alt and e which is going to make a stamp of all of the work that i've got in my workflow now if you didn't have other work that was happening down here all you would have to do for this on maybe a file that you've already finished you want to try this on is just press command or control j to duplicate that background but if you have a bunch of layers and work here you're going to want to make that stamp by pressing ctrl shift alt and e now we'll just call this glow base okay now with this base you have a couple options here some people like smart objects because they can go back and edit things so i'll show you this as a smart object but i don't always use them as a smart object because smart objects can add a lot of heavy weight to your images that aren't necessary especially when you have a lot of layers in your workflow so i'm going to right click this and i'm going to say convert to smart object so what that's going to do is it's going to record the memory of what these pixels look like and anything that happens to these pixels there on after so if i go to filter and go to blur and start my base with a gaussian blur i'm going to start this base at about 50 pixels that's usually where i start let's just go ahead and freeze frame this right here real quick because i know what a bunch of people are going to say blake you're just teaching us to blur the junk out of our images i don't like blurry photographs no that's not what i'm teaching here you need to follow me on this one but for all those that might be naysayers already i want you to take a look at this yes it looks like a blurred bunch of color and nasty mess taking all that gorgeous detail and turning it into a blurred mess but really what we're doing is almost kind of creating a dodge and burn map here because if we turn this to black and white doesn't this look like a really good dodging and burning layer to make those highlights come forward and those darks pushed down okay so follow me here all right it's just gonna get better now i'm showing you this in kind of the reverse order that i do things but i'm gonna kind of walk you through why i'm doing it this way first and then as we progress through the other images you'll see how i typically start that effect okay so i'm going to press ok now building that glow base just takes all of the things that we've done in our image and it blurs it what is happening here is it's taking these dark areas it's blurring them out it's blurring them meshing them in with the mid tones meshing them in with the highlights as they cross over each other and just creating a blur of all the things that have happened in the image below it the thing that we need to do here to make this really work is change the blend mode so let's turn our work on here and then we'll go up and we'll change this to let's say soft light that could be a good one to use it's going to give you a lot of dramatic effect here or i actually like linear light a lot now you see me use linear light many times before and you'll know that linear light is something that is controlled by fill so let's put that fill at about 15 so that's going to set the base for our radiating effect and that is the base of our rating and effect okay so we got this radiating kind of glowing effect happening in our image now just like with any other layer in your workflow you can use masks you can use opacity you can use blend if you can use all different types of things to ensure that you protect certain areas of the photograph from getting this effect too much and for this instance typically with linear light i will double click on my glow layer here and i will protect my underlying layers shadows by moving this over to about you know 60 or so until i start to see those shadows kind of pull in and then alt or option and feather this over and then alt or option and feather this over in the lights so now our mid-tones through our darks and lights are being targeted but our darks and lights are being targeted less than our mid-tones that's typically how i set up my glow base if i'm using something like linear light because linear light can be very strong on the darks and the lights now all we need to do is modify the tones of this glow and the color of this glow so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to put a curves adjustment layer on top of here now the key here is that i only want this curves adjustment layer to affect the glow not anything else so if i press alt or option and click in between this curve and the glow this curve is now only affecting this glow that's called a clipping mask that means that this curve can only affect the things that are directly below it and it will not affect all of the work that i've done here it's only affecting that glow so this is where i can really modify and shape the tonal values of our glowing effect now because i'm working with tones and tones only i'm going to set this to luminosity and the reason why i set this to luminosity is so that this curve is only going to affect the luminance values of the things below and not the colors at all because i want to shape the tones of this now the easiest way to do this is to make a three-point curve so we'll put a point here on the shadows point here on the midtones point here on the highlights if you move any of these up it's going to make that respective area brighter if we move any of them down it's going to make that respective area darker so if i move this down it's going to make my darkest dark areas darker if i move this up it's going to make those midtones brighter okay and if i move this down it's going to make those highlights a little less bright or up make those highlights brighter this is where we start to shape the light of our glow you see what i'm saying here we are re-lighting this photograph essentially and shaping the light and how this glow is affecting our image now i did say that this becomes a traffic director okay and you'll see this in the next image almost perfectly after i have set the luminance value of that glow or the tonal values of that glow i'm going to alter the colors in my last video i showed you how to use the color balance adjustment layer i'm going to use color balance for this and the reason i'm using color balance is it's going to allow me to shift where the colors are in the highlights mid-tones and shadows of the glow now this glow is obviously going to be affecting everything that's happening underneath it but we don't want this color balance to be affecting the image as a whole so i'm going to alt or option click and that's going to put this color balance into the glow so when we do that that's called a clipping mask that clipping mask is going to take on anything that is happening in the layer that it's clipped into so this is saying that this color balance is not clipped into the curve it's actually clipped into where the curve is clipped into which would be this glow base you'll see how this comes into play here after i'm done modifying this i'll show you what would happen if we don't set this as a clipping mask so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to take the color balance here i'm going to look at the mid-tones and say okay what happens when i move this back and forth well i kind of like it when those mid-tones get a little bit more on the green side let's see what happens when we get those mid-tones a little bit more on the cyan side and maybe a little bit more of that yellow in those mid-tones now go to the shadows and the shadows don't want them to be cooler or warmer well here's one thing that we can do here is because this image is already really warm we can cool down these shadow areas pretty well here by doing something like that and that's going to cool those shadow areas down a little bit now we go to the highlights and we can see if we want maybe more of a reddish color in those highlights or a cyanide color i kind of like it with the cyan and those highlights and maybe a little bit magenta in those highlights and i'm just kind of moving back and forth to see what my eye likes now here's the color modifications that we made to this see we just took a little bit of the edge off of the color that's in the image now i did say that if this wasn't a clipping mask look what this would look like it's ugly why is that well that's because these harsh color balance settings that we're using here actually are very tame because they're taking on the values or the layer properties that are in that glow base which would be linear light and the fill of 15 the same thing would happen here is if we alter option click on the curve this is what the curve and the color balance would be doing if we didn't have that glow layer in between okay so now the glow how does it look i think it looks pretty good but it is very strong so we could then come in here and drop the opacity a little bit or we could get really clever and mask in places that we want to get that back now i did say that you could make this a smart object and what's the benefit of it being a smart object you could double click this gaussian blur and here after you're all said and done you can modify how the blurring effect is going to be of that glowing layer now the lower you go the less of a glow you're going to get and that's going to give you all of the intensity of what's happening above it it doesn't look that great the more you go up the higher it spreads out and the more subtle the glow can appear so experiment with that i tend to find that on my sony raw files somewhere between 50 and 75 pixels is good but that's based on the pixel dimensions so it's basically based off of the ratio or the size of your image so if the resolution of your image is a lot smaller let's say you're using a 24 megapixel camera you might find that your radius is better at maybe 30 pixels instead of 50. so you have to experiment with that i'm going to leave that experimentation up to you on your own i'm going to work a little bit faster on this image here but i want to show you that this can be used in a landscape image it can be used in an architecture image and it can be used in a portrait image let's do this let's just go and duplicate that background layer commander control j now i did say in the last one that i was doing that kind of in reverse order let's first start this off at linear light with a fill of 15 percent and the reason why i'm showing you this like this is because if we go into the filter we go to the blur and we go to the gaussian blur you can actually see what that effect is going to be instead of just seeing a blurred image and this could help you with maybe not having to use a smart object from the beginning that's completely up to you if you want to avoid smart objects sometimes i avoid them like the plague and sometimes i love them just depends on my workflow now press ok so again this is our base so we'll just put base here or glow base now i'm going to make a curves adjustment layer alt or option change that to the luminosity blend mode and now i can start to modify the glowing effect of this and i'm what i'm doing here is i'm trying to shape the light so that the viewer doesn't look as much at the chairs and instead looks at the beautifully open gorgeous bright architecture that we have here my original image i just see texture i see detail i see data i do see where maybe i want to look but it's just not spelled out for me but with the glow we're saying hold on a second make those darks a little bit darker push those chairs away a little bit we'll brighten up our mid-tone values a little bit so that the eye wants to go to those and then we'll taper down our highlights so that they aren't necessarily as bright because if they get bright then we start to blow things out the color balance put the color balance adjustment layer on there alt or option and now we're in the mid-tones we can alter what the look of this is going to be so that i can alter the mood that this image might be putting off so maybe the mid-tones i want them to be brighter and more uh warm so i'll make them warmer with a little bit of red and a little bit of yellow but then the shadows i might cool them down a little bit by giving them a little bit of that blue cyan and green treatment and then the highlights i might do a nice gentle mix of both by adding a little bit of that yellow red and maybe a slight hint of green here okay and we'll look at our before and after here's the before here's the after okay now we did also say that sometimes those darks can get a little fuzzy and messy you can see right on here on the sides and also uh in between each of the individual chairs that's where double clicking on our base because we're set to linear light we're basically dodging and burning with this we're going to feather our darkest dark areas and feather our lightest light areas so this targets our midtones that's essentially the base it's pretty simple i could very well make an action for this for you but i'm not going to because i really want you to experiment in the next image i'm going to show you some of the ways that i experiment with these glowing effects why do we do this okay i've created this action in the zone system express called the tone assessment and what the tone assessment does is it breaks our image down and makes it really easy to see what the viewer is looking at here's our before i did say it's kind of like my eye is going everywhere right right like look at the lights and the darks and look at these mid-tones now look at what happens after we put the glow on there we are telling our darkest dark areas to push down get darker those become barriers for the eye and the eye doesn't go there first instead it's now traveling through the mid-tones through the highlights and it's being opened up into that space that's why these glows work these glows work because they help direct the viewer's eye into exactly what we want them to see again if it's a little bit too much we can drop the opacity a little bit there and get that blended in you can also use masks and brush out anything that you don't want to see there okay let's go into the last image here now in the last image let's do the same thing command or control j to duplicate that background layer we're going to call this our base here i'm going to show you how you can experiment a little bit with this base now let's add on and tack onto this we already know that we're going to want to use linear light because that's my favorite blend mode we could use soft light because soft light does produce some pretty good results here as well i prefer linear light drop that fill down to 15 and because we know we're already going to want to protect those highlights and shadows let's go ahead and alt or option feather those shadows over feather those highlights over and we've got that protection in there okay so that's going to be our glow base let's go to filter blur gaussian blur so now we can get a really precise view of what this glow is going to look like because our base is set with linear light it's set to 15 and we've protected the highlights and the shadows so this one actually looks pretty good at 75 pixels if you go too low it just looks like you know too much radiance there let's go to about the let's go 65 pixels we'll press ok that looks pretty good now i want to add that that curves adjustment layer on there alt or option this is going to shape tone okay three-point curve point on the shadows point on the mid-tones point on the highlights bring up those mid-tones draw the viewer into those mid-tones maybe make those darks a little bit darker there and then maybe bring those highlights up a little bit too and brighten that up a little bit okay now we do want to change that to luminosity so that doesn't affect the colors it just affects the tones while it's doing that now we'll go into that color balance and you can use any color adjustment layer at this time let's say instead of using color balance because i did say i want to experiment now let's use selective color instead alt or option click that in now this is going to help shape the colors that are in the glow of this image looking at the yellows and yellow specifically i can maybe add a little bit more magenta to those yellows to give those skin tones a really nice color i could then also maybe take away some of the science to make that yell that yellow a little bit more on the red side and then maybe take away some of the yellow to give those highlights a little bit more of that blue look this is going to be subtle and i want it to be subtle i don't want it to work too fast i want to see these small color changes happening so that i don't work too fast and then get stuck with something i don't like oh the reds look really good with a little bit of that yellow added to them and then we could even make the reds a little bit more intense with the color with the tonal value of black by adding more black into those reds okay so very subtle it's not going to look like a huge difference but there's other color things that we can use here let's say we want to add a solid color adjustment layer here i'm going to alt or option click on the solid color so it goes into that glow and we can see things a little bit better now with this solid color fill we can double click this color and we can change this color to anything we want to get a nice color grade that is going to blend beautifully look at that i mean this is just ex i didn't even script this this is just sheer experimentation and it's a lot of fun now we added the color fill there how can we make that blend better well maybe we'll put a blend mode on there maybe we make that cut that color fill a soft light color fill and look at that maybe drop that opacity a little bit you see i'm just kind of experimenting here to see what i can come up with here is our before here's our after you notice how the glow just pulls us in it pulls us into the image if we were to put that tone assessment on there and see what exactly is happening with this glow that we've put on here all you got to do is turn this preview off and you'll see that there's the highlight areas in the original image are going to be her shirt and her face and the background with the glow we've made it more of a priority on what's happening right here with her and less of a priority of what's happening around her like we see in the original image she is actually pretty dark in the original image now she's actually brighter so we're our eye is naturally going towards her face a little bit more now i would caution her to keep that hay away from her eye because she's about to poke herself but i'm not the photographer this is adobe stock what can you do with your experimentation here you can add any adjustment layers that you want into this glowing mix anything this is what i would tell you to do though if you put something on there that doesn't look very good consider the blend mode that you're using like let's say i put something on here like this is might sound crazy but the channel mixer in a recent addition to the zone system express i have put something in here called the channel radiance and this was a complete experiment on my part where i put the channel mixer on there instead of something else sometimes you're clicking those adjustment layers and you get the wrong one yeah that happened to me but i was in the greenness you know let's just play around with this and see what happens if i start modifying this and i was like whoa that's hideous why would i do this the colors just look absolutely horrible and then i thought well the channels in our image they control the brightness also right let me change this to luminosity and once i did that i started to see that i could really shape this glow very strongly using the channel mixer here to brighten things up and darken things down within the individual channels of red green and blue and do i have any rhyme or reason to this not really i'll be honest i'm just kind of moving sliders back and forth to see what looks good and if it looks good i keep it okay go into the blue see what happens in those blues but you see how this channel radiance something that should have been disgusting if it was set to normal looks actually pretty good when we change it to luminosity to only allow that to affect the luminance values of the channels of the glow on all of our work some people say oh that's just a different way of doing norton effect well so be it orton effect glow effect radiance effect bloom effect whatever you want to call it these effects do a phenomenal job of drawing the attention of your viewer into exactly where you want them to see if you like this video i got a whole playlist right here of photoshop tips and tricks that can help you in your workflow today if you like what you're seeing here please consider subscribing i like to take very difficult things in photoshop make them seem extremely simple so you can use them in your workflow today thank you very much for taking the time to watch this i sincerely appreciate it go out and experiment

Channel: f64 Academy

Views: 18,678

Keywords: Blake Rudis, f64 academy, f.64, How To, Tutorial, Photoshop, Adobe, orton effect photoshop, Glow Effect in Photoshop, Photoshop Glow Effect, how to make images glow, Radiating glow in photo, radiance effect in Photoshop, Bloom effect, Photoshop Glow, Photoshop Radiance, Photoshop Orton, Photoshop Bloom, blake rudis color theory

Id: UKAeRdQ15WU

Length: 20min 49sec (1249 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 20 2021