Create a Magic, Dreamy Glow (Orton Effect) in Lightroom. NO PHOTOSHOP REQUIRED.

if you've ever come across a photo online that has a really nice soft focus soft glowy effect to it and you've wondered exactly how the photographer managed that well this is incredibly easy to accomplish in lightroom in fact it only takes two sliders and i'm going to show you how to do it right now greetings my excellent friends it is josh cripps here what the heck do i even want to say to get this video rolling so this soft glow soft focus type of effect is known as the orton effect and that's because it was invented by a guy named michael orton and how this is traditionally accomplished was either in the darkroom or in photoshop where you would take two copies of the same photo one that was in focus with all the details nice and sharp and then a out of focus or a soft focused copy of that exact same image overlaid at a low opacity typically with a little bit of extra contrast thrown in so that the glowiness really popped and really had a luminance to itself but thankfully there's a way to accomplish this same cool effect right here in lightroom well and first of all let me say that this effect does not look good on every photo and you should not use it on every photo i generally find that this works best on images that have a lot of direct sunlight striking something in the frame because that glow is going to provide luminance to whatever is being lit within the frame so this works really well for photos like this where you have a lot of backlit fall foliage or photos like this where you might have one or two bright spots in the frame that could use a little bit of extra glowy fairy tale magic i wouldn't use this for every photo and i don't recommend that you do either but play with it and see where it might lie within your tool kit to create the effects that you want so to create the orton effect here in lightroom all we're going to do is play it with these two sliders the texture and the clarity and what these do is they allow you to manipulate micro contrast with the texture and fine contrast with the clarity and when you reduce both the micro contrast and the fine contrast it helps the light and dark areas within a photo bleed into each other which creates that magical glowy feeling and so you can see here as i slide the clarity slider down you'll see that the glow increases that fuzziness that magical fairy tale feel increases and the texture has a similar effect as well and the way that i like to keep these two sliders differentiated in my own mind when i'm doing this adjustment is the clarity is the amount of actual glow that you're getting you can see that as i slide it up the image starts to get crunchier and crunchier and as i slide it down you can see especially looking at the sun there in the middle of the frame that the amount of glowiness increases then the texture what that does as you slide it farther and farther towards the negative side is it increases the amount of what i call painterliness within the photo it kind of smudges out the details and makes it look a little bit more like an oil painting instead of a photograph so i like to first play with the clarity to dial in the amount of glow that i want and then i use that texture adjustment to slide that down as well to provide a little bit of that painterliness to the degree that i think looks good within a photo and for the purposes of this video i'm going to do all of these adjustments to a high degree so that you can see the effect really clearly you can see exactly what i'm doing but as with all things post-processing i generally recommend to use this very subtly the less is the more if you know what i the mean so honestly that's really all there is to creating this orton effect in lightroom to a first degree this is how you can start to create that glow but of course we don't want to lose any amount of detail within the image we don't want to smear all the nice cool features within the landscape out so i recommend that after you start to apply this glowiness and this painterliness that you come down to your detail tab and zoom in just to make sure you haven't totally obliterated those fine details and if you have you can use the sharpening feature to bring some of those back and a really cool tip when you're doing this when you're making most adjustments within lightroom actually if you hold the alt or option key it helps you visualize really easily how the adjustment is being applied so for example if i hold the alt key on my keyboard which would be option for you mac users and i slide the slider up and down it turns the image grayscale which makes it a little bit more easy to pick out the amount of detail that i'm doing the same is true with the radius i can see exactly what kind of radius i'm applying in terms of the sharpening as well as the masking i don't necessarily want it to apply to the darkest shadowiest area so i can play with that adjustment to bring back some of that detail that i may have lost due to adding some glowiness and some painterliness within the image okay now that's a really good first step but all of the adjustments that i've been doing here have been global adjustments so they're not only applying this glow and this painterliness to the highlights to the luminous parts of the frame that actually should be glowy that actually should have that ethereal fairy tale feel to them but they're also doing it to the shadow areas and it has the side effect of making those shadow areas look a little bit smudgy and featureless like if i zoom in on the tree branch right here the tree trunk that's what this is called it's a trunk you can see that it's just lost a little bit of the detail that it would have otherwise if these sliders were zeroed out so if there was a way that we could apply these adjustments to just the highlights and in fact that's what a lot of photographers do when they create the orton effect within photoshop is they use luminosity masks to apply it just to the highlights to really emphasize that glow but it turns out there is a way we can do that within lightroom as well and we're going to use the graduated filter tool to do that so here's what i recommend you do don't actually apply these adjustments here in the global adjustments let me turn off that sharpening as well just for now okay but instead apply it with a graduated filter so you can hit that button right here or you can hit m on your keyboard and that's going to bring up the graduated filter tool and you can see i already have some texture and clarity adjustments dialed in here and you can just grab the ones that you thought looked good when you were playing with the global adjustments just use those same numbers right here in the graduated filter tool now the way that we're going to apply this tool is a little weird because we want this adjustment to take place across the entire photo but then we're going to dial it in so that it plays with just the highlights so the way that we get the graduated filter to apply to the entire image is not to apply it on the image itself like this oh no definitely not what we do is we start above the image and if your image builds the screen too far you can always shrink it down a little bit like that and where we're going to do this now remember a graduated filter begins where you click and it ends where you release that click and so we want this to apply to the whole image which means we're going to click and drag away from the image like that and that means everything down here if i show the mask overlay you can see it's applying this graduated filter adjustment to the entire image but what's cool what's really neat about using a graduated filter in order to apply this adjustment is we can come down here to the range mask turn that to luminance and now we have a tool that allows us to tell lightroom exactly what tonal ranges we want this graduated filter to apply to we only want to apply it to the highlights right so we can play with the range by dragging the shadows up now remember what i said about that alt or option key being your new best friend in lightroom if you hold that key on your keyboard while you're sliding this lightroom will show you exactly what tonal ranges it's applying that adjustment to now remember we only want to apply it to the bright parts of the photo to emphasize that glow and so that we don't cause our shadows to get all smudged out so you can slide this up something like that perhaps all right so if i zoom in now here to an area that has both shadow and highlights and i move this range up and down you can see that it is applying to the shadows but as i slide it up it applies it only to the highlights which is exactly what we want now the smoothness slider right here that is basically how abrupt the transition you are asking lightroom to make between the shadows and the highlights so if you want it to go more subtly a nice subtle transition between the shadows and highlights you can slide that up if you want it to be a little bit more abrupt you can slide it down like that now i'm going to make it a little more abrupt because i don't necessarily want this adjustment on the trunks i only want it on those nice backlit leaves and if i click on this button show luminance mask you can see now i have this fantastic mask within lightroom that was created so quickly and easily that is applying this orton glow this soft focus fairytale glow with the negative texture the negative clarity just to the highlights it gives us a ton of control over exactly where this adjustment happens within the photograph and how freaking sweet is that and if i now click on and off the gradient tool here you'll see that i did in fact add some nice glow to this photo in fact let me turn that glow up to an extreme degree so you can really see the effect here i've added that glow to the highlights they really have that nice ethereal feeling to them now but i haven't smudged out all the details in my shadows now something that i want to mention really briefly which you can add a little bit of extra sparkle to this effect remember how i said at the beginning that this effect was typically accomplished by combining two copies of the same photo and that out of focus copy was added with a low opacity but some extra contrast to help that glow really feel luminous now you'll see if i turn this gradient filter on and off watch what happens to my histogram so with it off you can see that my highlights are just a little bit brighter because the decrease in contrast the highlights are bleeding a little bit more into the mid-tones and the mid-tones are bleeding into the highlights so it pulls the overall brightness of those highlights down so to bring back a little bit more of that brightness to make those highlights that glow really pop a really simple adjustment you can do go ahead and get out of the graduated filter by hitting close right here or hitting m again on your keyboard then go down to the tone curve so i'm just going to pull up the upper end of my tone curve here a little bit till that histogram more closely resembles what i had before and you can see that that glow that brightness of that glow is being enhanced as well here's the before and here's the after that glow just has a little bit more light to it all right let me show you that whole process one more time from start to finish you can see how i would apply it to one of my photos so i'm going to hit m to bring up the graduated filter tool and i'm going to dial in a glow and a painterliness just to start then let me apply this to the whole image by clicking and dragging up away from the photo now that looks a little bit too painterly for me so i think i'm going to dial down that texture a little bit but i do like that amount of glow and this is really easy to adjust you guys just slide it back and forth until you get a level that looks good to you i think that looks pretty good right there now i want to make sure that it's applied mostly to these bright highlights here in the trees and so i'm going to turn the range mask to luminance there and then holding alt or option i'm simply going to slide this up until i'm seeing that this effect is being applied essentially to the brightest parts of the photo just like that so we have that nice glow in the tops of the trees there yeah that's nice it's a subtle effect but again with processing subtle is good it's just that little bit of extra mystery and magic added to your photos without smacking your viewer in the face and saying look at this cool new trick i learned in lightroom all right you guys that is gonna do it for this video i hope you enjoyed that and found it useful if you did please subscribe because i got all kinds of videos like this on the channel and also coming your way in the future now get out there get in the lightroom and add some glowy magic to your photos until next time have fun and happy [Music] shooting bye

Channel: Joshua Cripps Photography

Views: 18,045

Keywords: landscape photography, make your photos glow, beautiful landscape photos, create beautiful landscape photos, edit amazing landscape photos with lightroom, orton effect in lightroom, dreamy landscape photography, landscape photography edit workflow, add a glowy look in lightroom, landscape photography editing in lightroom, edit amazing landscape photos in lightroom, add a dream glow effect to your photos

Id: nCcG5xL9QXY

Length: 14min 11sec (851 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 22 2021