Orton Effect - Add A Soft Focus Glow To Your Photos

[Music] hey everyone Steve for backcountry gallery here thanks so much for stopping by and watch my video today this time around I want to share a fun Photoshop trick I'm gonna show you how to do the Orton effect the Orton effect basically adds a dreamy glowy misty kind of feel to your images it was originally created by Michael Orton way back in the film days but now we can do the same thing in Photoshop with just a few quick steps now many people see the Orton effect is simply a special effect you can add to your photo from time to time and well it gets used that way quite a bit I personally added to my workflow for probably 80% of my images I tend to use it in very subtle ways and generally only in selected areas of the image most of the time you never know it was there and that's the whole idea so here's what we'll do we'll jump into Photoshop and I'll show you how to do the effect and then I'll give you some examples and demonstrate how I work this into my own post processing workflow at the end of the video I'll even give you a set up actions that I created that you can actually download to make it easier for you to use this Orton effect technique anytime you like so let's go ahead and jump right into Photoshop [Applause] okay so here's the image we're gonna go ahead and start with and I figure you're gonna probably have one or two scenarios you're either gonna have an image that's just one layer here like I have right here which is my background layer or you're gonna have an image more likely with a lot of different layers and now you're ready to add the Orton effect at the end and that's actually the one I'm going to show you but I actually kind of want to show you both ways here so if you happen to be in a situation like what we're looking at here simply click your background layer and create a new layer to go ahead and do your Orton in order to create the new layer you hit your command or in Windows your control key and the letter J that will go ahead and duplicate the layer and then we can go ahead and proceed here with our Orton effect now I'm gonna go ahead and delete that though because I don't think that's not most people end up using this I think most people using Photoshop have probably put a few layers in there so I'm gonna go ahead and put some layers in here and we'll pretend that we used all these layers we'll pretend we started off with kind of a flat background looking layer of very low color and we used all these different adjustment layers and now this is our final result what we're looking at here on the screen and now we want to add the Orton effect because I think that's probably how most people are gonna end up using this so what we need right now is a merged layer and in order to do that it's actually really easy you hold your command alt shift and your letter E key down all at the same time all four of those keys and that creates a merge layer once you have that we can go ahead and proceed with our Orton effects so let's go ahead and do it right now okay so our first step is to turn this image into a screen version of itself and we're going to do that by going to the image menu and hitting apply image right here and when we do that it brings up this little apply image box and basically what we want to do is where it says blending we want to switch that from whatever's in there now mine happens to say normal yours could say something else but we want to switch this over to screen mode once we do that we can go ahead and click OK and you can see we have a really bright version of the image but don't worry that's as expected and exactly what we want next we need to duplicate this layer so we're gonna hit command or in a windows computer control and the letter J that duplicates our layer so we have our new copy selected we're gonna click our blending mode menu here and select multiply and now we have kind of an Orton effect going on but it's quite there yet because it is missing a piece and what it's missing is the blur so what we want to do next is making sure this layer is selected is to go to our filter menu blur and Gaussian blur now when we do that you can see instantly we have some radius set in here already we instantly have an ordinate now the radius will allow you to control what the effect looks like more radius doesn't necessarily give you more effect it just tends to look a little bit different as you adjust your radius to different amounts so you can go ahead and kind of tweak this until it gets to something that looks pretty good and I'm gonna go ahead and go about 43 on mine and hit OK next we want to go ahead and merge this layer down to this one so that's pretty easy we just right click where it says layer 1 copy here yours will probably say something else but go ahead and right click the layer we just did and select merge down and that will go ahead and combine the two layers for our Orton layer now I'm going to double click where it says layer 1 and type in Orton hit enter and there we go now we have our Orton effect layer now personally I always think this is way too much for my personal taste so a lot of times I'll go ahead and drop the opacity down to something more realistic I like in the 30 some place while we do like 34 and I'll go ahead and switch that on and off so you can see the difference it certainly did make a difference in the photo however this isn't necessarily how I use this in my workflow so let me show you how I do that next okay so let's talk a little bit about workflow now generally speaking I don't like having the Orton effect all over the entire image most of the time I like it in selected areas particularly areas that are maybe in the image would be far away from the viewer such as the little beach over here this area right in through here maybe the lighthouse to a lesser extent sometimes I will leave it up front a little bit it all depends on the image and what I think is gonna work this is really a personal preference type of situation here so a lot of times you have to play with it so what I do to begin here though is I make sure my Orton layer is selected and I go down here and I just drop a layer mask in and maybe I'll go ahead and click my brush tool make sure my brush tool selected and make sure Black is my foreground color a lot of times I'll start up here with an opacity if maybe about 50% or so and then I'll use my brush to go ahead and brush out the Orton effect where I really don't like it for example the ordinate really tends to block up shadows pretty hard so like you can see in the bushes here these are almost black shadows now so I'm gonna try to get rid of some of the Orton effect around there I'm just gently brushing this out I don't want to use 100% of brush I want to kind of do this gradually that's why I'm he's in a 50% brush the black on the lighthouse here has lost all detail and I'm not even sure you can see that there is a little bit of detail coming out here I'm not sure if you can see it in the video or not but basically I want to make sure that I keep all the black clean and not getting too blocky so I'm going to take the Orton effect out of there next I'm going to go ahead and make that brush a little bit bigger I like the Orton effect overall in this photo but I'm not sure if I'm really loving it up here by this grass that's right by the viewer so I'm going to take it out of here I'm gonna take a little bit out of the house and the lighthouse itself and normally I would do a little bit better job than this I'd be a lot more particular about it but for the video here I just want to kind of give you a rough idea of what I would do and maybe take a little bit out over here I just want to blend it in and make it a nice natural look to it I want my goal is that when somebody looks at the photo they don't immediately say oh Orton effect I wanted to look at it and say oh that's just a nice photo that's what I'm going for and let's go ahead and take a look at the before and after with this particular image it's subtle and hopefully you can see this in the video it is a subtle difference but it definitely does make a difference and I think it makes the photo look a little bit nicer so generally that's how I use Orton in my workflow so let's go ahead and I'll show you those actions I promised and I'll give you a couple more examples alright next let's talk about that set of actions I promised you again they're completely free and they will do the Orton effect for you so it makes it really really easy basically you want to go to WWE a very calm slash SP - Orton dot zip so that addresses backcountry gallery calm slash SP Orton dot zip and if you have that typed into your web browser address bar you can just hit your Enter key and it'll go ahead and automatically download that for you now from there you'll need to go to your default downloads folder and extract it it is a zip file and once you have that extracted just put the steve perry Orton effects action folder that came with it just put it wherever you normally keep your actions I like to keep mine in My Documents folder but whatever works good for you so let's take a look at just how to load those right now so if you're in Photoshop here and you're like okay it's time to load an action easiest way to do is if you see this little play button over here just click that now if you don't happen to see the play button though if you just have nothing over here no option for that just go to window and select actions right here and it'll bring the same thing up for you now let's go ahead and load those first we need to go up to this little tiny menu up here it's really small just up here in the corner click that and select load actions right here so I keep mine in My Documents folder so I'll click documents and there's the folder the Steve Perry's Orton actions that I just downloaded and put in My Documents area there I'll click that and right here's the action you want to go ahead and click that and select open and it'll go ahead and load the actions right into your actions palette so you can go ahead and use them ok so let's talk about how to use these Orton actions that we have here now now as you can see we have several different ones here we have a light blur a medium blur a heavy blur Max blur and then an option to run all which we'll talk about here in a little bit now basically these give you different radiuses for your Gaussian blur tool for example light does 20 medium is 40 heavy is 60 and Max is 100 now keep in mind again that the amount of radius the amount of blur that the Gaussian blur filter is applying to these basically makes it look different it doesn't necessarily give you more effect now let me show you how to use this if you for example right now we just have a background layer now these are actually meant to be used with multiple layers that's why it starts with a merge visible command right here so if you have just a single background layer you will need to go ahead and hit command J or ctrl J if you're on a Windows machine to go ahead and duplicate that layer so it has something to work with otherwise if you're like a normal person you have a bunch of different layers above your background layer with curves and levels and whatnot then you just go ahead and just run it as is and not have to worry about anything but in this case we didn't need to make an extra layer so we did and let's go ahead and just run medium blur right here and see what it looks like how about that instant Orton effect and as you can see it already has a layer mask in here because as I said in my particular workflow very seldom do I just leave the whole image with the Orton effect I usually like to select it out of certain areas and this image is of course no exception you can see right here the eyes have lost a little bit of their sharpness and the snow's lost a little bit of its crunchiness now some people might like it some don't I personally want to see sharp eyes so I'm gonna go ahead I have my brush tool selected and I have black as my foreground color and in this case I'm just gonna go ahead and stick with 100% opacity normally I'd want to maybe blend that in a little more gently but in this case we'll just go ahead and use a hunter just to kind of get this done so I'm going to go ahead and just brush over the eyes right here and kind of sharpen this back up for us and I think that looks really nice let me show you the difference here here is before any Orton effect was applied and here's after it just gives it a nice glow if I was gonna be picky about it I'd probably reduce my opacity down to 50% here maybe brush a little bit out of these areas right here but that's probably about it I really like the way that looks now a couple other options here by default these actions will set the opacity to 30% because I think that's usually a good starting point now obviously if you want more you can Jack that all the way up to a hundred and really get a lot of effect going on there or you can just have maybe a 12% effects so it's just very very subtle so you can go ahead and adjust the opacity and again if you don't like the way the blur looks on this you think maybe more it'd be better or less would be better there's a bunch of different options right here and in fact let's talk about maybe the option to run them all so we can do some comparisons let's look at that next okay let's talk about the run all option now basically what this is gonna do is it's going to make four different layers each with a different amount of blur so you'll have a light blur medium heavy and max blur layer once this is all run so in order to do this it's the same as the other ones you either need to make sure you're on your topmost layer or if you just have a background layer duplicate the layer and then go ahead and click play right here so let's do it all right there we go we have four different layers that have come up right over here with different amounts of blur and you can see they're all by default turned off that's so you can just go ahead and click them and kind of compare and see which ones you like better and you can kind of go through and just decide which effect is the one that's going to be right for your particular image and I found that every image is a little bit different so a lot of times different effects will look better or worse depending on the image so anyhow that's the main gist of it there now one thing to keep in mind is of course these do have layer masks so you can go in and you can adjust it like we had talked about earlier we can also adjust things like opacity so maybe I like max blur but I like it up here and 57% because I want a lot of effect or maybe I don't want to have max blur on at all maybe I want light blur and I want just a little bit of effect whatever I want to do I can go ahead and do it and this gives you a ton of options and you can even mix them together you could say oh I'm going to use a little medium blur and a little bit of light blur right here I have both of these on at the same time just a different opacities so this gives you a ton of flexibility to get just the exact kind of look that you want one word of warning though these two through a lot of history states in fact they use about 33 different history states so for example my history is only set to record 30 different states so if I go ahead and run this action I'm going to not be able to undo anything I did prior to running that action so just make sure that you're aware of that and if you're concerned that you may need to undo something you did prior to the action make sure you go to your preferences over here Photoshop preferences and go to performance and you can go ahead and increase that history state up to maybe 40 yourself but anyhow that's the gist of it and that's how it works I hope you guys find this handy alright that's about it obviously there's a ton of flexibility and options you can exercise with this technique and I encourage you to give it a try just be careful not to overdo it well that about wraps things up if you've enjoyed this video please click the little like button if you're watching this on YouTube also please sign up for the email newsletter at my website and subscribe to my channel so you never miss a tip feel free to share this video with your friends or anywhere on the web and thanks so much for stopping by have a great day

Channel: Steve Perry

Views: 66,623

Keywords: photography tips, photography help, Backcountry Gallery, Steve Perry, nature photography, orton effect, how to do the orton effect, create the orton effect, soft focus effect, how to do soft focus in photoshop, make your photos glow, soft focus techniques, soft focus in photoshop, image glow in photoshop, soft focus glow, orton, orton effect photography, orton effect photoshop

Id: dI4WpPIBoRw

Length: 15min 12sec (912 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 06 2014