Apply a Soft Glow Effect to Pictures
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Written by
Gregory Scot Collins
Thursday, 16 August 2007, 8:23 PM
This article has been tested to work with the following products and versions. No guarantee of compatibility, with or without modification, is offered for products or versions other than those listed.
- Photoshop CS1 and CS3 (Adobe)
IN THIS ARTICLE:
Most pictures can benifit from some minor editing—some in a major way. Applying a soft glow effect will alter the mood of a picture in subtle or dramatic ways. The effect can be quite stunning, and might give a feeling of elegance, romance, or dreaminess.
Apply a soft glow effect
Applying a soft glow effect to your pictures is very simple. It requires only a couple of blurred layers with different blending options. It is achieved using the following steps:
- Launch Photoshop.
- Open a source picture.
- Duplicate the background layer.
- On the duplicate layer, choose Blur | Gaussian Blur from the Filter menu.
- Set the radius to 30.0 pixels, and then click OK.
- Duplicate the blurred layer.
- In the Layers pallette, change the Blending Mode to Soft Light.
- Select the middle layer, and change the Blending Mode to Lighten and the Opacity to 50%, as shown in Screenshot 1.
To alter the mood of the soft glow effect you can choose a different opacity and/or blending option for either blurred layer, or you can reordering the blurred layers.
Following are some examples of the soft glow effect applied to pictures I took with various digital cameras. Other than a size reduction, the only manipulation done to the original picture was to apply the soft glow effect, as described above. Certainly one would take other steps, such as color correction, before applying this effect.
Example 1: Wedding photography
The first example is a candid picture of a bride on her wedding day, taken with a flash in the dim indoor lighting. Note how the background becomes darker—washing out unnecessary detail. The subject of focus, the bride, glows (as she should on her wedding day). A very subtle smoothing has also occurred in her skin.
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