Quick tip: The dream effect

In this Photoshop's quick tip i'll show you how to create a effect that is commonly referred to as a dream or soft focus effect. It's a very simple tutorial so i've added it to the quick tips section.

It's actually very easy to do. Let's open some picture. It's best to apply this effect where there's lots of highlights, for example wedding photos etc. I'll use a simple image, however:

First, duplicate the layer. To do that, press CTRL+J on the keyboard. That doesn't really duplicate anything, it simply transfers the selection to a new layer, but since we have nothing selected - the whole image will be copied to a new layer. With our new layer selected, go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur .... Now if you expect me to tell you how much of a blur to apply - you're wrong :) The key here is to make the image blurry, but neither too little nor too much. Look at the example blur below and you'll get it:

As you can see you can still make out what's in the image. The radius of the current blur is 5 pixels and the image itself is very small. For digital photos you might need 20-30 pixels of blur or even more. The more blur you add - the softer your image will look in the end. The final thing to do is lower the opacity of the blurred layer. Again, there's no better judge than your eye. Here's how it looks with 50% opacity:

And there you have it. The soft focus aka the dream effect. One more thing left to do though ... As you can see, by applying the soft focus we've lost some detail on the image. If we want to restore the detail (eg. for faces or other detailed objects), we can delete some parts of the blurred layer. Here's how it works: if you delete a spot on a blurred layer - the image won't be blurred on that spot, thus bringing back the original detail. Although i've mentioned the word delete, you should probably use layer masks to mask certain parts of the image.

Above you see an image with two rightmost flowers and one leaf in their original detail. If you don't know how to use layer masks, please read my non destructive deletion with layer masks tutorial.