Digital Soft Focus
Most lens-makers offer a soft-focus lens, and you can get screw-in filters to achieve the same effect. Or, you can mimic the effect in the digital darkroom. There are a few advantages to Photoshop: you can decide after the fact which photos benefit from the effect, and you can apply it selectively - avoiding the eyes and hair in a portrait. This article shows how to create the effect with post processing.
Contents
Example Photos
Below and at right are two photos, with and without digital soft focus. Click on each image to it before and after applying soft focus.
The original image has more contrast; it's darker, but only in the shadows and around the highlights. ( The gamma is almost unaffected - look at the out-of-focus background on the right edge of the frame. ) The first model's eyes stand out as the only true black in the photo. Also, the highlights are "smeared" to create an angelic looking fog around the model. With photos that look more like a dermatology exhibit than a portrait, the effesct smooths out the photo, removing a little bit of detail, making pores in the skin less noticable. Finally, the overal photo is given a softer, more diffuse look.
Step by Step
Creating a soft focus image is easy enough, and the process can be automated if you allow for a couple of prompts. ( In fact, a Photoshop Action can be downloaded at the end of this article. )
- As always, save your work, and then build a new layer as a copy of the active layer, or background.
- Because we want to smear the highlights, we start by enlarging them. Select Filter -> Other -> Maximum. The radius depends on the size of the image, and the number of pixels that make it up.
- For an 8x10 from a 5D, I use about a 40 pixel radius.
- At web size, 6 pixels works pretty well.
- At this point the image looks ugly, but we'll fix that.
- Use a Gaussian blur at half the radius you used with the maximum filter.
- Now use the Motion Blur filter to spread the highlights away from their source. Set the angle to about -45 degrees ( for a diagnol pointing up and left ), and the radius to about what you used for the maximum filter.
- Finally, pull the opacity for the soft focus layer down to about 25 %, although you can change this to strengthen or weaken the effect.
- At this point, you should have a pretty good image. But you'll want to create a layer mask, and paint out the eyes, lips or teeth, hair, and anything else you want to retain its full sharpness. The eyes are by far the most important.
At this point, you're done. Because the changes were made to a duplicate layer, you can turn the effect off at will.
Download
See Also
A small dose of soft-focus can be extremely useful in portraiture, especially when there's too much detail in the pores of the skin.