Create DREAMY Images with the ORTON EFFECT in Photoshop

hey everyone i hope you're all doing well in today's video i want to talk about one of the more popular editing techniques used in landscape photography that is the orton effect and the orton effect is a process where you can find two images of the same composition same scene to create a final image that has some high detail and some low detail areas and really where you see this today it's become really popular in sunrise sunset landscape photography to kind of add this glow this kind of dreamy ethereal effect to your images it's a really unique cool editing technique but i think it's one that can be overdone and is overdone a lot so you want to make sure you're subtle when you're subtle it can really add this like i said this dreamy effect to your images overdone it doesn't look professional it doesn't look real so most of the time you're going to see this with sunrise sunset images where i actually like to use the orton effect is in woodland scenes i think it can really add this like i said this ethereal mystical almost like fantasy type effect to your woodland scenes it's really almost looks like you're creating atmosphere or fog in your woodland scenes and kind of adding this depth even if there wasn't any and like i said that's because you're adding these layers of high and low detail so today i'm going to take one of my favorite woodland images i don't haven't actually shown it to anyone yet i'm going to post a video next week about the on location shoot i had when i took this image but i just want to talk about it today and kind of walk you through how i add the orton effect to my images i don't want to preface that by saying in no way am i a photoshop wizard or the master in the orton effect or anything like that so don't be too harsh on me if this is not the best way you can add it or the optimum way it's just the way i like to do it and it works for me so first i want to show you this five the final image that's been completed and as you can see it kind of really has this nice soft background it's kind of those lighter colors in the background just kind of fade away and really add some depth and atmosphere to this really magical looking tree the tree in the foreground is really high detail really sharp in the background slowly loses that detail and almost has this glowing foggy kind of effect and really has this kind of magical looking scene and that background is really where i've kind of applied the orton effect i have that background in lower detail foreground in higher detail and it really just adds those adds that magical effect so i'm just going to walk through really quick what i did to achieve that look and how i go about applying the word effect in photoshop so let me share my screen with you really quick okay so now hopefully you can see my screen on here and you want to start by editing your image in lightroom in photoshop whatever you add do your original edits and as you can see i started in lightroom imported into photoshop made some final tweaks here and this is my image before i add the orton effect i like to add the orton effect last it's really the last thing i do before i export my images before i check them once again in lightroom just to make sure they're good exposure for printing things like that but i've made all my color adjustments dodging and burning hue saturation whatever it might be i've already done all that and now i'm really just ready to add that orton effect as my final kind of finishing step so first what i'm going to do i'm on this last layer here which is a hue saturation layer that i applied and i want to create a merged visible layer and to do that on mac i'm just going to go command option shift e and on windows i believe that would be control alt shift e and that just creates a layer that includes all of all of the layers that you've done so far it's really just a copy of everything you've done to that image so now that we have that copy we're going to come up to filter we're going to come down here to blur gaussian blur and you're going to want to play around with this but you usually want a radius between 20 and 30 pixels just to get that soft look i'm gonna hit okay right now we have this very blurry looking image or a tree here's here's i kind of unclick this layer take this layer off you see this very blurry image that's not really what we want obviously but this is our low detail image that we're going to combine with our normal high detail image creating our orton effect so while we're selected on this new merge visible layer that has that gaussian blur we're going to come down here and add a layer mask that layer mask is all white which means it is revealing this new layer if it was all black we wouldn't be able to see any of it so what i want to do here well so actually first what i'm going to do i'm going to come over to opacity while i'm selected on that layer i'm going to bring down the opacity to a point where i think it looks good just like i said before the orton effect can be overdone it doesn't look professional when you overdo it it looks amateurish and it really takes a wave even if you've taken a great image you can butcher it in editing and we don't want to do that so there you can see we've taken down this opacity and we really have this really glowy really glowy looking image i'll toggle it on and off for you there's it with it on it's really kind of hazy looking glowy it doesn't look quite out of focus it's different than out of focus it just looks really just like it's glowing so i'll toggle it off for you there's our sharp image and there's it with it on so i could end there and you'd be like well that's okay for me um what i i like that tree to be a little sharper so like i said it has i have this layer mask white reveals black conceals so we're going to take our brush and we're going to switch over to black here and i'm just going to paint away on the center part of this tree i'm actually going to bring my flow down with my brush because i don't want to take it all the way right away so i'm going to bring down maybe to 15 here or something i got this nice big soft brush and i'm just gonna paint away in this middle portion okay so i'm just taking away a little bit of that orton effect on the main part of this tree just so we can get some of that texture back in the bark okay so you can see i have this little bit of a layer mask here now with just some gray taking away from that blurry layer so now if i toggle it on and off you can see that background still comes in very dreamy looking and i've probably overdone it a little here but i just want you to really be able to see what this orton effect does but by adding this layer mask i brought a little bit of texture back in the bark here i might add a little bit more back even okay that's looking a little better so like i said it's probably overdone a little bit here um but i hope you can see really what i've done so that that background of this image is now looking really really atmospheric really misty really foggy really has that dreamlike look so that's one way you can apply the orton effect that is not actually the way that i do it but that's the simplest way in a way that anyone with photoshop can do so i'm gonna get rid of this layer here really quick okay so now we're back to our normal image i'm going to extend my panel here i have a lumensia panel uh imported into my photoshop and it's just a panel where i can easily apply luminosity masks and aluminum luminosity masks like that layer mask i just created mask things out based on lightness and darkness in the image and for me the orton i usually like to apply the orton effect to the highlights of my image those brighter spots so if that's a sunrise or a sunset it's probably the sky in this woodland scene for example those foggier uh more atmospheric areas areas are usually a little bit brighter that tree is darker so i'm going to apply the effect to those lighter portions so again we're going to come down here we're going to create another merge visible layer and we know what that is now so now instead of creating a layer mask for that layer i'm going to create the layer mask a little bit differently so i'm going to come up here to my lumensia panel and i'm going to create a luminosity mask based on lightness not darkness so the lighter areas as you can see this is kind of a copy of that layer mask the lighter areas in my image are going to reveal the orton effect and the darker areas will conceal it so that's still a little too much on the tree for me so i'm just going to tone that down a little bit i can just bring this slider down which is really nice thing about the lavenzier panel i love having this little slider here okay so now we're a little darker on the bark of the tree that'll keep some of the texture there let me get a little darker okay we'll come down here to mask just take a second great now we have that layer with the mask and make this a little bigger okay and we're going to come up here again filter blur gaussian blur 30 is kind of where i like it and we have mainly applied this effect now only to that background because of our luminosity mask which makes things really easy that's still a little overdone but i'll toggle it on and off so you can really see that's with it off on we have such that blurry background we still have texture in our bark because of our luminosity mask but we're still going to tone it down a little bit um if this is the actual image that's that's still a little too much for me but at least you can see it when i have it a little bit more um we're down 38 now that's subtle and that's probably where i would keep it um i'll tell you that on and off for you again just to make sure you can see that so yeah i think that subtle or an effect is a lot a lot more pleasing a lot more professional looking and that that adds something to your image without taking away uh if you overdo it you start to take away from your image because don't get me wrong editing is important and do it knowing effects like the orton effect can really elevate your photography but taking the picture is the most important and if you've taken a fantastic image the last thing you want to do is edit over the top and take away from that great composition that great image so i know that was a quick episode this week i just wanted to talk about the orton effect you see it so much and it's so popular right now and i think it's a cool editing technique it's just something you want to make sure like any editing technique that you're not overdoing but i hope that you found the way i explained that in the way that i implement the art effect useful for me it's simple um i like that that first method you can implement without any fancy luminosity panels however i would recommend anyone that's serious about photography to go out and get a luminosity panel they're not that expensive it's a great photoshop plug-in and there's so many of them now and it really is a way to elevate your game because i use luminosity masks for all sorts of things whether it's exposure blending time blending orton effect just really really being able to prioritize and localize your adjustments in photoshop based on light is invaluable really i use lumensia it's great it's simple uh it's fairly inexpensive it really just focuses on luminosity masks there's some panels that do a lot more um and you can go ahead and i mean you can just type in photoshop luminosity panels and you'll come up with a whole list of there's so many of them i'm not going to go into all of them but i like lumensi it's simple yeah it gets free updates yeah if you want to go that simple that first fruit that's very simple if you want to go to the second root with a luminosity mask panel that photoshop plug-in that's another great way to do it that's the way i usually do it makes things easier and it's a more polished finished image so that'll do it for this week's episode i really hope you enjoyed learning about the orton effect and a couple different ways to implement it if you found it helpful if you could consider giving this video a like and hitting that subscribe button that really helped me out i really appreciate it but as always thank you so much for watching uh i really do appreciate it stay safe everyone i'll see you on the next one bye [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Matt Ashley

Views: 1,661

Keywords: landscape photography, orton effect, orton effect photoshop, photoshop, adobe photoshop, photography tutorial, photo editing tutorial

Id: X8vpOhdL3qs

Length: 14min 29sec (869 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 07 2020