Orton Effect

The Orton Effect is one of my favorite effects of all. It makes the images very nice, warm and soft and can be used on almost all kinds of photos, even nightphotos.

Here is an example used on flowers:

Now, achieveing this is very simple and can be done in just a few steps.

1. Open the photo of your choice into your photo editor. (must support layers)

2. Sharpen the image a bit more than you would normally do but don't ruin it. (you can play around with this for the result you want)

3. Duplicate the background layer and set the layer mode for the new layer to 'Screen'. Change the name of this layer to 'Screen'.

4. Duplicate the 'Screen'-layer and name this 'Gaussian Blur'. Depending on the size of the image, you might wanna try different settings here as well. If it is a normal fullsize image like 4288 x 2848 like the Nikon D300 deliveres, I normally end up somewhere around 15 pixels for the gaussian blur. Smaller images = less pixels, but you decide... 

5. Change the layer mode for the 'Gaussian Blur' layer to 'Multiply' and then play around with the opacity for this layer to get the effect you want.

...and there you have it!

Here is a short video of my layers palette while doing this on a different photo. 

For more information on the Orton effect - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orton_(photography)