Feature: Add Soft Focus Using Layers

As any Hollywood cinematographer can tell you, soft focus is a powerful, beautiful effect that can greatly enhance photographs of people.

Of course, when I say soft focus, I don't mean "out of focus." Soft focus is not the same thing as a blurry picture. Indeed, if you look closely at a soft-focus photograph, you'll see that there are sharp details in the image--but the picture has an overall glow to it that takes the edge off of the hard edges.

So how do you get a soft-focus effect in your photos? The old-fashioned way is to apply some gel to the front of your camera lens. Or you could use a special soft-focus lens designed for just that purpose. This is the 21st century, though; let's do it the digital way.

Start With a Portrait

Open a portrait photo into your favorite image editing program; I'll demonstrate with Corel's Paint Shop Pro. If you don't have a photo handy, feel free to use this picture of my niece and her daughter. It's not a bad photo, but it's marred by some weird blurriness at the bottom. I don't know what caused that, but I originally thought I should crop the bottom away to eliminate that distraction. Later, I decided that I could obscure it by applying a soft-focus effect.

Find the Right Softness

The first step is to apply a generous layer of blur. There's nothing better than the Gaussian Blur tool for this kind of job, so choose Adjust, Blur, Gaussian Blur from the menu. The specific blur setting depends upon the size of the photo. The image should be very blurry, but still recognizable. If you go overboard, the image will lose all form and just be a vague smear of colors.

Since this is fairly small, try setting the radius to 10. If you were working with a much larger image (say, a 6-megapixel picture) you might need to set the radius to about 25. When you are satisfied with the blur, click OK. You'll have something that looks like this.

Make It a Layer

Remember how I mentioned that a good soft-focus picture still retains sharp, focused details? We'll achieve that effect by combining the two images--the sharp and the blurry--using layers. Copy the blurry image to the clipboard by choosing Edit, Copy. Then undo the blur (choose Edit, Undo Gaussian Blur) to get back the original, sharp version of the picture. Don't worry--the undo step doesn't affect the copy you stored in the clipboard.

Now it's time to combine the two images. Choose Edit, Paste, Paste as New Layer. Because the blurry image is on top, that's all you'll see.

Adjust the Blur

Finally, to finish the image, reduce the opacity of the top, blurry, layer until just the right amount of sharpness peeks through. To do that, make sure you can see the Layers Palette. If you can't, toggle it on by choosing View, Palettes, Layers. Your Layers Palette may have opacity sliders on it. In this screen shot, the sliders are the little triangles next to the open eye.

If you can, drag the slider until your picture looks good. If not, double-click on the top layer (it's probably called Raster 1) and use the opacity control in the Layer Properties dialog box to make the adjustment. For my final picture, I used an opacity level of 62 percent.