Creating that Landscape Soft Glow Look (The Orton Effect)

wait everybody Mack Laskowski here and in this video we're gonna take a look at a very popular landscape effect it's called the Orton effect but if you don't know what that is it's kind of a softer dreamy atmosphere that we see in a lot of landscape photos it's not limited to landscapes but I'd say most of what we see it in is gonna be in a landscape photo few you do any searching online and some popular websites where a lot of landscape photographers post you will see this effect over and over again it was created by Michael Orton back in the 1980s which is also a time where many many great great songs and music was created as well I digress though but it was graded by back in the 1980s it was a creatives of film technique which has been kind of modified to work in digital you can google and find out plenty information about it I don't want to go into the history of it what I want to do is show you kind of the basis of what it is a few different ways that we can create it I really want to dive in because I think the the magic from this comes and not just seeing how somebody else does it and what everybody else is doing out there but I want to dive into some ways that you can use it some ways you can create it and then also really show you some of the nitty-gritty around it so that you don't just take what everybody else did but you also know how you can modify this and make it your own so let's go ahead and dive in here I'm gonna basically build three different ways to do this we're gonna build in complexity too so it's gonna go from fairly simple here and just Lightroom to some Photoshop stuff and it's a little bit more of an intermediate type of a tutorial cuz I'm not really I'm gonna use layer masking but I won't really cover the basics of all that stuff okay let's dive into Lightroom here I'm covering this because I know some people just use Lightroom and there's things that we can do so if you go over here to the clarity setting and you crank up clarity it's obviously gonna add some contrast and almost a grungy type of a look to your photo the Orton effect is is based on a softening effect okay that if you really go into the details of it it was two exposures one that was sharp one that was out of focus and so you get almost a blur well if you go negative on clarity we can she get a softening type of a look here so it's not exactly the same that we can get inside a Photoshop but we can get something similar and if you want to kind of take a step step ahead of what we're doing now rather than just come in here and just cranking down your clarity setting what we can do is go to a tool like our graduated filter all right I'm gonna double click the word effect here it's gonna reset all my sliders and then I'll just bring clarity down here to I'll just go negative 100 we'll crank it up and then what I'm gonna do is I'm not gonna drag across the image or you can drag across the image I usually just drag outside the image or you can drag across and then just drag it outside but I'm trying to apply it to the whole entire photo which is very similar to what we did in the basic panel same effect same same thing just a different way to do it and the reason that I'm doing that is because I'm gonna get I'm gonna get access to some different things here one of those things being yes sure we can go ahead and we can soften this but we can also go in here one of the things of the ordinate that also was that it had a the second exposure was brighter so we can go over here and do things like exposure or even whites to brighten it up and then you even have the option to maybe pull back on highlights if you find it's too intense in some areas too so you can you know the the original effect didn't necessarily account for these things but these are things I think you can do that to add your own flair to it not just copy what was what was originally done out there so we can we can do things like this it's also you know part of the way that we'll do this in Photoshop adds contrast to it and so we can go over here of course and add contrast to the photo and you'll see it adds quite a bit of contrast so and that's that's part of the effect here so you may or may not like that level of contrast but you know you can always dial that back and then the other nice thing about doing it with the graduated filter and really the main reason I did it is because we have access to the range masking tool here okay and this is at least in the when I say access to it you need the Creative Cloud version for this we come down here to luminance and what I can do right now it's being applied to the whole photo if I find a lot of times I find it's it goes too much into the blacks and so what I can do here is limit the range so it's not going into the blacks as much all right it's not going into this area right here it's just going to go between this value of gray and this value of white were we're limiting the range by luminance that this effect whatever these sliders are is being applied to so if you were to zoom in on this photo here hit commander control plus you will see it does have that effect that does have that softening glow effect to it that's before and that's after things are still sharp and and I'm gonna say this again probably several times throughout this you know we don't we spend a lot of money on lenses and tripods and tech camera technique to get sharp photos we don't want blurry photos this isn't about blurring your photos about just adding a soft glow to it okay so that there is a indeed a way that we can do it here so you kind of kind of see the Lightroom way if you want to intensify it go over to your graduated filter right click on it and choose duplicate and that duplicates it and adds another one on top of it you can see now there's two here it doesn't duplicate the range mask it actually does a duplicate the range mask exactly because we duplicated the pin so you could see it adds on top of the effect and again you know some may like it some may think it's too soft and glowy what you know this this is where your personal taste comes in maybe you pull back on the clarity on the second one so it's not quite as much don't forget you also have a brush go to your brush and you can brush it away from areas where maybe you find that it's too intense I'll go in to erase mood and if I find out that it's affecting you know maybe the water or some area too much I can go in here and I can brush that away okay so that is the that's the labrum white the the the next two methods are gonna be similar to each other they're just gonna build in complexity but they're mostly gonna rely on Photoshop I'm gonna jump into Photoshop for the next one here and so the the way again without going too much into it with all that you research the original technique on your own I don't want to get into what was done but I can give you the oh the high level overview which is there was two exposures first one was a base exposure normal second one was brighter overexposed and and out-of-focus so what we can do here in Photoshop is press command or control J duplicates the layer alright now we got our copy so we need to do two things to this we need to brighten it and we need to blur it all right the order doesn't really matter so we'll come up here to image adjustments brightness I'm deliberately not using an adjustment layer for this because I want it to happen on the layer image bright adjustments brightness and I'll crank it up usually quite a bit you know thirty thirty percent or so and then click OK so you can see that's the original and then this is our brightened version and then we're going to come up to filter blur Gaussian blur and I generally blur this about half the the megapixels of the camera so think if your camera is a 20 megapixel camera I'll generally blur 10 if it was a 40 megapixel generally burglar 20 not a rule alright and and then the in the final method and third method you're gonna see it's gonna be a little bit easier for us to to finesse this if we want to so but we can just go by a guideline here so let's just go I think just I have actually sized this photo down a little bit so I'm not gonna blur it quite as much here but the next example will blur exactly half of what I did and then we'll click OK and then what we have to do next is change the blend mode here's where things diverge alright you're gonna see all you're gonna see several different ways to do this the most common ways that I see our overlay and soft light and they both do the same they're both gonna add contrast to the photo but they're also gonna hide the blur but still keep a softening you'll see here let's just click overlay okay and then I'll click on soft light so very very similar just one is a little bit contrast II a little bit more glowy a little bit more intense than the other one so we'll go with overlay and this one but it's totally ok sometimes you might want to pull back a new soft light and then sometimes you'll see if you watch tutorials online you'll see multiply being used as well and it just this depends on the mood of the photo you know there's there's no there might be a technical right answer to this too to what Michael Orton originally envisioned for this but in this day and age there is no there is no right answer to it it's it's what you like sometimes I like when the photo gets really dark and I'm just exposing the bright parts of it that looks kind of cool but we'll go down here I'll stick with overlay for this and then I'll bring the opacity down to zero and I do that a lot with this effect and then bring it gradually up until I get it to a point where I like alright and a few things happen let's let's first zoom in and take a look at that a little bit of the effect here you're gonna see that the specially areas that have light get almost the soft glow to them sometimes it's even described as a dreamy effect it's got atmosphere to it and you'll find that the photos that have more death to them the more depth the more atmosphere the better okay because this glow this this type of effect the softness really starts to especially the further away we get from the camera you'll start to see some pretty nice atmospheric effects taking place a lot of times you know whenever I have atmosphere I have atmospheric perspective as things get lighter and hazy ER as they go away people always say like why don't use the dehaze slider I don't want that I want that depth to my photo so I would never use the haze D haze on that I use D haze when haze is just overwhelming but to me I like that I like that atmosphere of perspective and when I can enhance it like I'm doing here even better again you get that again soft glow of it's almost a dreamy effect areas that are lit tend to get a nice glow and a nice warm light to them as well so what's inevitably inevitable above uh some might redo the photo I'm gonna leave that in there um what's inevitably gonna happen is you know you're gonna have to get this away from parts of the photo all right so let's pull it back you're gonna have to get this away from parts of the photo a lot of times what I'll see is the the darks get too dark the blacks get too black I can go over to this layer over here double click anywhere it's gonna open up the layer style dial in the layer style dialog I'm going to go down here to blend if and I'm gonna hold down the option key on the Mac or the Alt key on the PC click on this slider when I hold down option or alt it splits it and it'll fade out some of those blacks a little bit from this top layer this top layer that caused those blacks to get too intense in the first place it'll fade that out a little bit so that's one option you can try that on the highlights too you can start to fade out some of those highlights you got to be careful because sometimes you'll fade out the glow so it's it's kind of a catch-22 we'll click OK on this one I think I would probably pull the opacity back quite a bit and then the the biggest thing that I'll see is is when you have a bright sky if you're shooting into the Sun we're gonna have to pull back on on the sky a little bit we're gonna have to mask that out so I add a layer mask press B for my brush tool set the foreground color to black and I would go up here and I would mask out any bright areas from the sky and you'll see that done quite a bit I'm gonna show you one more example here where by the way let's take a look so that's before that's after again a little bit of a nice soft glow you can adjust the opacity as you need and as you want that intensity or don't want that intensity and so what happens on a photo you'll see this used a lot on Twilight photos photos without the Sun works really really nice again the more the more depth there is the better it's gonna work so I'll run through this one a little faster command or control J image adjustments brightness crank that up here let's go 30 40 % filter blur Gaussian blur and this was a 40 megapixel cameras all about split it right around 20 click okay and then go down here and change that blend mode we can try multiply probably way too dark overlay or soft light okay any one of those I'll stick with soft light on this one and then as you again as you zoom in you're gonna see a glowy soft type of an effect to this okay it's got that soft glow to it now same thing as before we can double click the layer open up the layer style dialog we can option or alt-click on our black slider and we can start to bring back some of those darks I'm trying to look to make sure I don't get a halo around some of these trees here and then the other thing is you might notice sometimes it makes it too too intense as far as colors go and if that happens you can go image adjustments hue/saturation and pull back on the saturation a little bit alright and that'll take some of that intensity away and of course you've got your layer mask you've got all those tools that you can go in here and adjust what you just did okay last way to do this before we do that quick word from our sponsor which is me um I I hope I thank you for watching these videos I hope you enjoy them and really honestly the the biggest thing that I could ask a favour for is to just follow so wherever you're watching these videos whether it's on YouTube or Facebook YouTube obviously has a subscribed Facebook has a like that would be great and then another big thing is just to get notified so that I don't have to blast people with emails and post it you know over and over again if you turn notifications on so YouTube has a little bell that you can ring and Facebook's got a little notification area that you can set up to get notifications and your a little list there and that way you won't miss any of the videos when I post them okay back to our story so the last method still uses Photoshop but we're gonna start this one in Lightroom and kind of talk a little bit about workflow and let's let's go over here to to reset the stuff that I did before a lot of people will ask you know what do you what do you do as far as pre-processing very very little all right I'll do some shadows and highlights maybe a quick exposure or white balance but I typically I typically don't do whites and blacks or contrast or anything cuz this effect adds a lot of that so it's like why set a white and black point when that's gonna train change dramatically later on so I typically don't put a lot of color or contrast into the photo just some basic shadow and highlight toning which again we may come back and change later again so we do that the next part we're gonna go photo edit in we're gonna open this in Photoshop or we're gonna do it a different way we're gonna open it as a smart object into Photoshop and the reason being is smart objects going to give us a couple of different ways to do things and you'll notice it's a smart object cuz it's got that little icon in the bottom right corner so we want to make a copy of the smart object fact we want to make two copies the first way I'm going to make a copy is a little bit different I'm not going to hit command or control J I'm going to right-click and choose new smart object via copy reason I did that is now these are separate the the cool thing about a smart object is when I double-click it it's gonna go into Camera Raw again it's gonna let me adjust my settings if if I did this with commander control J when I went into one layer they're linked it would do the same thing to the other layer but this way by doing right clicking and doing new smart object via copy they're not lengthen they're separate and that's what I want now for the next copy I am gonna press commander control J because I want them to be linked so now we have our top two copies let's let's go let's go name this one over exposed and let's name this one glow ok atmospherical whatever you want to name it the orange low atmosphere any one of those will work and then we're gonna do one more thing just to keep things tidy we're gonna click on the top one shift-click on the middle one and press command or control G or you can just come up here layer and we're gonna group these together so just come right down there and group them together ok this will all start to become a little bit more clear in a minute here let's hide the glow let's go to our overexposed layer double click on it's gonna open in Camera Raw how much do I over expose usually a stop stop and a half over whatever it was whatever you had set it to originally there's no rule for that it's just generally that's what I'll do but again we're gonna be able to change this in a second you're gonna see this is a very non-destructive way to do it and we'll click OK you're gonna see both of these layers adjust which is good that's what I want and we're gonna go to the top layer turn that one on and now we're gonna apply our blur so let's go filter blur Gaussian blur and this was a 42 megapixel camera so at that 21 22 somewhere around there right that seems like a pretty pretty good number right there we'll click okay and you're gonna also notice because this was a smart object layer not only can we go back and forth the camera but it also makes filters smart filters and this is really gonna come in handy in just a second here but the you'll notice one of the other things is we still have to apply a blend mode I'll usually go and apply the blend mode to the group okay not to an individual layer inside of the group which by all means you're welcome to experiment with I use you go in here and apply the blend mode to the group again we got multiply kind of cool we got overlay and we got soft play okay let's go you know I'm kind of tempted to go hey yes too much let's go overlay okay so we're going on this one and of course a layer group has opacity so we would bring that down to zero and then we would start to climb up and start to bring that glowing okay here's what's really neat about this effect and that is because we did it with smart object layers we can we can change this in so many different ways let's say the the water is too intense we can double click on our layer here and and we can go over here and we can pull back on the highlights you can use your adjustment brush to go back in here and paint over areas that started to get a little bit too bright you know over a little too overexposed inside of that look there you can pull back on your overall exposure if you find that that was too much click OK and you're gonna notice it goes in here and it updates everything because we did our Gaussian blur on a smart layer we can go in here and we can just paint away the blur with that layer mask just set your foreground color to black press B for your brush tool and then I can go in here and all you're gonna use a 100% opacity I can go in here and I can brush away the glow from any parts of the photo that I don't want okay so that's going to come in really handy and then you can adjust the glow so I'm gonna zoom in command or control + so I'm gonna zoom in a little bit here and part of this glow is if you were to imagine you know what's really happening is let's change this back over to let's change this back over to where it was before crank up or opacity we're blurring colors and we're blurring colors in in past lines of other colors so while the the glow can look good sometimes you don't want certain colors to bleed into each other so that's something you can go in here and you can adjust again we'll go down here change our blend mode back reduce the opacity okay and then we can go down here to double-click on Gaussian blur it's gonna open up that blurred to high log box and now we can get a real-time view because we've already placed all of our layers exactly where we want we can get a real-time view of exactly what this technique is gonna look like exactly what this blur is gonna look like on our photos so we're you know they're the guesswork is now gone as we you know we kind of were guessing a little bit before but doing this way the guesswork is totally gone and we can go in here and get a nice live preview of exactly how that works okay so commander control - to zoom out we can hide those layers in fact the easiest thing to do is turn on the layers and go up here and hide that layer group that's before that's after as you've seen everything is changeable we can double click we can change the blacks we can paint mask out blacks we can do whatever we need to do to get this to the look that we want that's really what I was hoping with this is one thing to show you the formula to get there and this is a very popular technique you'll see a lot of people using it however I don't just want to show you what everybody's doing I want to show you the basis to that it's good to learn it but then I want to show you how you can go in and make it your own okay folks hope you enjoy this and as I mentioned earlier would love if you would just subscribe to the YouTube page or like on the Facebook page and and you'll get notifications whenever I release a new video thanks so much for watching and I'll talk to you again real soon

Channel: Matt Kloskowski

Views: 37,478

Keywords: orton effect, lightroom, photoshop, mattk, soft glow landscapes

Id: npDC7v0Qsz4

Length: 23min 1sec (1381 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 07 2018