Make Your Photos Dreamy - Using the Orton Effect in Photoshop CC

hello and welcome i'm svenja and today i'm going to show you an effect that instantly adds a dreamy magical glow to your images if you've been on social media for a while you will very likely already have encountered this effect because it's widely used in landscape photography i'm talking about the orton effect it was invented by michael orton in the 1980s so it's been around for a while michael orton tried to replicate watercolor paintings in his photography and he used two images of the same scene to go about this way the first image he kept in focus to capture all of the detail of the scene and the second image he blurred and also overexposed slightly and then in the dark room he put both of these images together he merged them and the result was an image that was both sharp and blurry at the same time with glowy magical highlights and we're going to talk about how to achieve this effect in photoshop today now there are many ways to go about achieving the orton effect in photoshop and i personally prefer anything that is straightforward and easy so i'm going to show you how i do this effect are you ready to join me let's get started i would duplicate the background layer twice command j command j the top copy i'm going to label sharpness or hp sharpness because it's a high pass filter a high pass filter detects edges in the image and highlights them by brightening the light parts of the edge and darkening the dark parts the layer below it i'm going to label blur and i'm going to convert it to a smart object here we go and i will explain the advantage as we go we're going to go into blur gaussian blur and we're gonna take this up a notch so my rule of thumb is to add as much blur as my camera has megapixels and my camera has about 30 megapixels so this is going to be my happy spot i'm going to click ok you can't see it right now because i have the hp sharpness layer up top so it hides everything i'm going to toggle that off now you can see that there's actually blur applied the smart object allows you to see every filter that you have applied so say i wasn't happy with my blur amounts it was too much i could always double click here and it's going to bring up the blur that i used and i can adjust it i could drag it down to the left which will reduce my blur or i could bring it up to the right which will increase my blur i'm going to cancel because i'm pretty happy with the 30 but i wanted to show you this is the big advantage of using smart objects you can always go back and you can um adjust if you need to however if you were to apply the blur on this kind of layer without the smart object it's baked into the layer and say you were to edit other things on top of it and then you realized you're not happy with the blur then you have to go back in your history to the step that you added the blur in order to fix it or to delete the layer and you would just lose so much of your other edits that way so it's better to use a smart filter and be able to modify as you need to now we're not done with the orton effect we blurred and we also want to increase the contrast so we're going to press command l we want to go into the blur layer and we're going to press command l and that's going to bring up the levels menu we're going to drag the black slider all the way up this is going to increase my darks here and this is a little too much for my liking i'm going to take it down a notch right about here is pretty good then we're going to go and do the same on the bright slider we're going to drag it all the way in now let me show you something you want to be careful here if you push this too far over see what's going to happen in this corner right here where the sunshine is coming from it starts to be blown out and that's not good so you could fix that by making the brights darker but i'm not really loving this it adds a weird kind of gray tone to the to the image and i don't find it to look so nice so we're going to go back here and we're just being very careful not to overdo it on this stage at this stage right here so about here looks pretty good to me we still have detail in the colors right here and it's not blown out and that's really important to me the orton effect typically is somewhat overexposed so we could add some more lightness here while making sure that the highlights are not blown out i'm just going to reduce it a tad actually just want to be sure and then we're going to press ok and we could be done with this at this stage so what you would do then is you would go and turn this off and you're going to go into your sharpness layer and you're going to click filter go all the way to the bottom high path you click that that'll turn your image into gray totally normal totally fine nothing to worry about this is where the sharpening happens and if you look real close you see that there's fine lines right here and i like this number to be relatively low so 1.5 is good you can go lower too if you bring this up too high let's say this is really like you should be able to see something now you can see there's white lines and it looks like a little halo coming out if you see that you know you have overdone it and you want to dial it back so we're going to go right back to 1.5 and we're going to hit ok now we don't want the image to stay gray so we're going to go into the blend modes and we can choose any of these here just not hard mix that doesn't work but the other ones all work they will apply the sharpness and varying degrees of strength so soft light is the one that is the least strong let me zoom in and show you what it does pay attention to her face right here this is with sharpness in soft light blend mode this is without it you can see a subtle difference in the sharpness now overlay is slightly stronger hard light is even stronger vivid light even more linear light like you can really see that it starts to look i think vivid light is maybe the strongest um you can really see on her teeth right here it looks cartoonish it looks a bit overdone you can also see it on the reindeer here although with the fur it doesn't bother me to see all the detail but on her face i'm not loving it as much so i'm very happy having this at the soft light um blend mode and then we're gonna turn on the blur filter just for your amusement here you have sharpness but the color is not it not in any way matching it so what you really want to do is dial down the blur there like you never wanted a 100 opacity so what's good is what most will suggest between 10 and 15 however personally i like it a little stronger it totally depends on your image though some images call for just a touch to be perfect others call for a bit more so let's zoom out command zero this brings me to my full image and let's see where i would like this effect to be i'm gonna group my layers blur and sharpness i'm pressing my shift key and tabbing into tapping into the other layer and then i'm gonna press command g on my keyboard so they're grouped i'm gonna call this effect orton and now we can toggle it on and off to see the difference do you see it it adds it makes the shadows a little darker but it adds a nice glow into the image as well with the effect without the effect i'm going to see where i want the effect to be what about 25 but yeah i like this now i can see it looks a bit more dreamy which is what i wanted i wanted this effect to have this really surreal and dreamlike quality you could be done here and you would have a full orton effect i however would like to play a bit more so in my blur layer i'm going to select it and then i'm going to go into filter camera raw filter so the first thing i'm going to look at is my temperature i'm going to drag it down a little bit minus 8 looks pretty good this brings out the blues a bit more and i also want to bring out the magentas a bit more so i'm going to turn it up a bit and plus 8 seems a happy place to me as well now we can still increase the exposure here as well if you wanted to but i don't want to i want to make sure my highlights are not blown out so i'm going to drag my highlights down maybe here's fine i might bring my shadows up and my blacks just because the reindeer's feet seem just a little a little dark i might also bring my whites down just just a notch i think i'm gonna see what it does when i bring in some more vibrance the nice thing is you can go a little more than usual here because this layer will never be applied at the full opacity it'll always be somewhat reduced and because it's a smart object you can change it so i'm going to click ok now and see what that did i'm going to go here this is before the raw filter this is with the raw filter and i feel like it brings out the blues a bit more and just overall adds a little something something to the image however i'm not a huge fan of having the orton effect on her face or on the reindeer's antler the cutout of the reindeer is not as clear anymore so i really want to mask it off i'm going to add a layer mask here then i'm going to click into my reindeer mask to highlight it so that was a command click on the layer mask for the reindeer i'm going to make a press command minus to zoom out i'm going to press b for my brush it's at 100 it's a big brush and i'm just going to start brushing over my reindeer because i'm on that other layer mask and i don't want to have the orton effect on my reindeer the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to press command d to deselect my reindeer i'm going to click command while i'm i'm holding my mouse over the mask of the princess this selects the princess i'm in my orton layer on the layer mask sometimes i want to talk too quickly and i'm just gonna oh it comes out so jumbled and then i'm gonna go and do the same thing on my little princess now here's the thing it doesn't bother me as much on her dress because i feel like it blends in the dress but i don't like it as much on her face so i'm going to make sure that it's off her face i'm going to click command d to deselect and i think this looks much better but let's zoom in for a closer inspection now let's toggle the layer mask on and off pressing shift to toggle it off this is with the effect on the reindeer and on my princess i think you can see that pretty well here now i'm going to press shift again and click in my layer mask to toggle it off and there's quite the difference i do like the um the color on her skin so in order to get the color effect just on her without the blur i'm going to press my command key and click in the layer mask of princess that gives me the selection of the princess i'm going to come into my background layer and i'm going to press command j this duplicates my princess onto a new layer now i can turn the effect back off on her face what i want is just the camera raw adjustment so i'm going to double click the camera raw adjustment here and this brings it up all the adjustments we made i'm going to press ok but now i have my camera raw effect wait before we do that really critical in case i don't like it we want to convert this layer into you guessed it a smart object so right click and convert a smart object because i might just not be happy with it i'm going to label this layer princess now we have we should see in our filter up here and there it is camera raw filter and i'm just going to go ahead and click that and that should apply all of the changes and it didn't darn it i was hoping it was going to apply all the changes that we made so now the temperature was minus eight the tint was plus eight the highlights were minus 25 and then i think we had the whites down to minus eight blacks were up plus eighteen i think and then shadows were i think it was plus fifteen and i remember the vibrance was up by 40. and i believe that this was it now she looks pretty pinkish to me i'm going to click okay and i'm going to reduce the opacity to 25 so it's at the same opacity as the blur layer in my orton effect and i'm going to move this over top here all right now let's toggle this princess layer on and off there she looks like she's matching the seat a lot better now i'm going to zoom out now i'm going to turn her the layer off here and i'm going to turn off the layer mask now there's the blur there applied to it but let's toggle this off again it looks better it looks close we can also mimic what we did on the levels layer and i want to bring the princess layer up to 100 opacity to see exactly what playing on the levels layer will do whoa okay see how strong that is way too bright we're not going to go that intense we're going to keep to the bare minimum here i don't want to require that popping and if i don't like it i can always you know delete it so we're going to reduce the opacity again to 25 just trying to match the colors toggling it on and off we're definitely getting closer so let me show you what it looked like before we did the levels adjustment this was the before princess at 25 with just the camera raw filter applied and this is it with the levels layer she's a bit brighter she pops a bit more we're going to zoom out command 0 to get the full image and command minus to get it even smaller and i must say i'm pretty happy with this edit here if you don't do the camera raw adjustment that i did where you mess with the temperature slider and the vibrance you don't have to adjust any layers like i did with a princess because the colors would still look the same you'll be good to go but if you do decide to play around and you realize that you need to tweak something you know how to do that also feel free to start out with my exact settings on your image but please remember tweak it to your liking every image will need its own adjustments and you are the master behind your creations so trust yourself if you found today's video helpful please give me a thumbs up and it would be an honor to have you subscribe to my new channel and have you part of my youtube community here if you have any questions about editing or any requests or what you would like me to cover next on this channel please drop a comment in the box below i really look forward to hearing from you next week we're going to talk about the orton effect again and this time i'm going to try and replicate today's effect in lightroom so stay tuned for that it's going to be a fun video second image he blew out he uh no you will not need this extra adjustment layer on your princess in the meantime i hope you have a fabulous week until we see each other again um um take care and bye-bye

Channel: Svenja Christina

Views: 219

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Id: Q0qpEnsK8Ok

Length: 17min 38sec (1058 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 21 2021