Thursday, September 4, 2008

Dreamy Post Processing

1. Duplicate the base layer (command-j on the Mac)
2. Set the duplicated layer blend mode to soft light
3. Apply a Gaussian blur to the duplicated layer (35 pixels in this case)
4. Duplicate the new layer and set the blend mode to screen
5. Knock down the opacity of the new layer (here it's 45%)
6. Add a Hue / Saturation layer and knock back the saturation (-15 in this case)
7. Add a Curves layer and put a bit of a S-curve to it
8. Select the background layer, go to the curves palette and command-click on the RGB channel to select the luminosity
9. Duplicate the background layer to create a luminous layer
10. Apply a Gaussian blur to the luminous layer (4 pixels here)
11. Adjust the opacity to suit

Of course, sometimes you follow a recipe and decide afterwards that you don't necessarily like the entire recipe. In this case, I decided to turn off the second duplicated layer after the fact and tweaked the curves layer a bit.

Here's the before:



And the after:


Another technique for the books. As with all effects, your mileage may vary and really depends on the subject matter.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

thank you for posting this :)