How to give your images that soft DREAMY GLOW with the ORTON EFFECT

what's up guys welcome back to the channel today i'd like to show you a technique that i use in about 90 of my images and i'd say about 95 of professional landscape photographers use this technique in their images as well um it's a technique that's gained so much traction in the last two to three years i won't be surprised if lightroom comes out with a slider for it um that hasn't happened yet though so today i'll show you how this technique works in photoshop the technique is called the orton effect and i've been asked over the last three years so many times in comment sections and that sort of thing private messages how i achieve this effect in my images so i'll show you just how easy it is so let's jump into photoshop and get right into it alright so here we are in photoshop i've opened up my layer or my image that i want to edit it's down here in the right hand corner [Music] this image was captured in mountain city boy provincial park which is in canada i spent about four days actually four nights and almost five days camping in this area um i hiked in and then took a helicopter out it's just a gorgeous area if you get a chance to to shoot here it definitely sees the opportunity it's one of the most beautiful places i've ever been anyways on this particular night i was shooting sunburst peak here this is mount assiniboine in the background i had some nice directional light coming from the right here which was eliminating these peaks so using the orton effect i'll try to make this image look more dreamy and make these spots kind of glow more this kind of patchy light that i'm getting all over the landscape i want it to kind of glow so in order to do that i'll make a copy of this layer down here on the right hand side so hit command j hold down control j on a pc or you can always right click on the layer and go to duplicate layer anyways once i have the copy here i'll rename it important and then with that layer i'll come up to filter up here and i'll click filter then i'll come down to blur and i'm going to go to gaussian blur so we'll click that you'll have to put a number in here for pixels uh what i use is the amount of amount of megapixels that my camera is so it's shot with a nikon d850 so i punched in 44 here and i'll just hit ok and then i'll come up to image adjustments i'll go to brightness and contrast and click that so we want to make these parts glow right these highlights so i can make the image a little bit brighter so i'll go 12 for brightness and we'll add more contrast so i'll use 70. so now we have these highlights that are kind of blurred and these shadows that are as well and that's what's going to give us our effect so i'll hit ok here so great that's what we have that's obviously way too powerful we want to show most of the layer below it which is here but i have about 12 10 to 15 percent of this layer here so we'll bring that down [Music] 10. for demonstration sake maybe i'll bump it up just a little bit more than i normally would yeah let's go with 15. [Music] okay so i'll toggle that on and off so you can see how that just makes everything glow i mean look at the sky and these highlights here and kind of look up on this ridge can you see how it's just adding a glow in there i mean toggling on and off you can see the difference people looking at the image will just view it as being dreamy or ethereal so we've lost a little bit of detail there kind of in the rocks and that as we've applied this effect so what we want to do is bring that detail back so we'll make a copy of this layer again holding command j so we have another copy and we'll name this one sharpen and then we'll come up to filter go to other high pass and for this i use about three to four pixels for the radius so i'll hit ok and then i'll switch this to soft light so that's added a bit too much detail in here it looks just a bit crunchy to me it's just a bit too much sharpness if i toggle that on and off so let's bring that down to about 50 percent i'll put it above orton and we'll turn our wooden back on and i'll group these two into a group and i'll toggle them on and off so you can see we've retained that detail actually you know i might bring my sharpen up just a bit more just to bring back a bit more of that detail get something like 63. so if i toggle that on and off you can see we still have detail in these rocks here and in the mountain but we've added that glow if you just look in here so that's the orton effect for an image like this i'll show you one more thing i would do with an image like this just as a little bonus i'll create a new layer by clicking down here and then i'll come up to i'll switch the layer to soft light and then i'm going to come over to my foreground color here click that and i'll use the color picker and i'll click in here it's not selected this kind of dark orange or burnt orange i'll just this is saturation so this is darkness down here so it'll be more dark or if you want it brighter will come up here this is less saturation and this is more saturation so i think somewhere around here should be good click ok and then i'll go to my brush tool what i'll do is about 20 opacity here i'll just click here make this brush a little bit bigger click again a little bit bigger and then i'll look like here here and there okay so that's going to add just kind of a glow coming from the right hand side it just kind of looks like the light is coming right through the same light that's hitting these mountains because the same color is coming from the right hand side now so this is something i like to use with the orton technique so let's toggle those both on and off so now you can see how it's just kind of transformed this image so that's it basically that's the orton effect all right guys so it was a very subtle technique but i feel like it's a very effective one and i feel like it does make images just look more professional if you guys did like the content today please like and subscribe i plan on coming with a lot more videos in the next few months um so yeah hopefully you'll see in the next one take care bye now

Channel: Sean Holroyd

Views: 832

Keywords: the orton effect, Photoshop, Sean Holroyd, Landscape photography, soft glow, How to make images soft and dreamy, Lightroom, Luminosity masks, Orton glow

Id: jd76uZ54djg

Length: 7min 22sec (442 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 13 2020