Glowiness, and other Smoothing techniques
There are a million and ones ways to add that highly sought after smooth glowy look to your images, so I thought I'd share some of my favorite techniques. I usually end up using a combination of these, so if you're a reader of my "notes" links, some should be familiar... But I thought it would be a good idea to round them up in a semi-coherent fashion so that I can just point people here when I reference one of these in my ramblings...
We'll start with a simple little image I made out of two screen caps. It's got a close up, a middle distance and a distant figure, plus a good chunk of background, in it, so that you can get a good idea of how a given technique will effect different parts of a collage. I'm saving at jpg quality 5 since there are a lot of images on this page, so you'll notice quite a bit of undesirable pixellation. I'd suggest higher quality when you're working for real!
Note that I haven't done a thing with the colors, this is just the same old blah quality you get from most screen caps. For this tutorial, please click here to download a slightly larger, higher quality version of the basic image. Save it to your harddrive and open it up in photoshop.
First step then is to improve the color/contrast. You can do this with levels, curves, or selective colors, but I'm going
to explain another quick way that's a little less commonly used, but is unbelievably easy considering how effective it is. With the
image open in photoshop, create a copy of the image on its own layer by dragging the image layer to the "new layer" icon, or using the layer-duplicate layer
menu command. Now set the blend mode on this layer to "screen" (alt-shift-s). Finally play with the translucency of the layer, reducing it
a bit to take down the oomph to something a bit more realistic. I settled at 63%. When you're happy with the percentage, flatten the two layers into one.
| BEFORE: SOURCE | AFTER: SCREENED VERSION |
*NOTE: here's a variation on the theme, that I picked up from the creative forum: just as in the instructions above, duplicate
your original image on a new layer. Set this to screen (but don't scale back the transparency. Now create yet another duplicate layer,
and put this one on the very top, set the blend to "soft light". Scale that one back to 40-50%. Then make the middle layer (the screened one) active, and use the
adjust -> hue saturation to way reduce the saturation of that layer. You'll get something that looks like this:
| BEFORE: SOURCE | AFTER: SCREENED/SOFT-LIGHT VERSION |
Now which effect you prefer is purely a matter of personal choice, and I like 'em both, but just so we're all on the same page, let's use the first one to proceed. Now here's a little something I like to do because I like dramatic images: pull up the image->adjust->selective colors dialogue. select "black" from the colors drop down at the top. Now slide the "black" slider a bit to the right, I put it at +8. This makes the blacks a little blacker, and to my eye, adds a little oomph without the glare that simply upping the contrast can give.
| ORIGINAL | FINAL CORRECTED VERSION VERSION |
Okay, and with that, let's get down to this glow business, shall we? Each of the following sections assumes you're starting back at the color-correct version shown just above, so after you follow each through, use your undo, or save-as some other file name and re-open the original.
Easy Instant Glow
This is I think the easiest and most common glow used (many thanks to Val for first pointing this filter out to me!). It's just one filter, and you're done. First, set your background color to white (it could also be some other pale color, but try white first). Then under the filters -> distort menu, select "diffuse glow". Move the little thumbnail window so that you can see the closeup of Dawn's face. Put the graininess slider to "0" and then play with the "glow" and "clear" sliders. I ended up with 15 for glow and 10 for clear. Here's what I got:
You can stop there, or here's another little thing to play with: Right after you apply a filter, a "fade [name of last filter]" option appears in the filter menu. Select that, and play with different blending modes and opacities. If you select "screen" and 75% after applying the diffuse glow filter like I did above, you should get something that looks like:
You can also get some pretty extreme effects using this technique. Going back to the original, here's what I got when I set the background color to pink instead of white and used Glow:18, clear:14.
Instant Glow, Plus
Now personally, though I like the glow, I like to see peoples' noses retain some definition, which diffuse glow alone doesn't do such a good job of. So I've come up with a work around... I suspect there are others, but here's what I do:
Starting back at the original, on your keyboard press control-alt-tilda (or switch to the channel palate and control-click on the RGB layer). Now you have the luminosity mask selected. This means that everything that's purely white in your image is 100% selected, everything that's purely black is completely unselected, and everything that's something in between is partially selected. This may be a bit of a concept to wrap your brain around at first, but trust me it's very, very, very useful...
Now, switch to quick mask mode by pressing "q" on your keyboard. Now, everything that's NOT selected is dark translucent red, everything that IS selected is its normal color, and everything partially selected is some shade of translucent red. This isn't very obvious at first, because this picture doesn't have a whole lot of contrast. But we're going to fix that. Control-L to bring up the levels dialogue (or image->adjust->levels). Now click on the black dropper to activate it, and click up on the Dawn's left cheek. Then click on the white dropper, and click on the brightest part of Dawn's forehead. After I did this, my input levels are: 5, 1.0 & 155. Yours should be something close, making the masked collage look something like this:
Note how the dark side of Dawn's face is all red whereas the light (right) side is more nearly it's normal color. Click "okay", and then Q to switch back into regular mode. You'll see that you now have those bright parts of Dawn's face (and the rest of the image too) selected. Do control-H to hide the selection without actually deactivating it. (This makes it easier to see what you're doing, but don't forget that you still have the selection active, or weird things can happen later on, and you'll wonder why... trust me, this I know from person experience!) Now, run the diffuse glow filter again. I used the "extreme" settings (Glow:18, Clear:14) and here's what I got:
Note how the glow only affected those parts that were already somewhat highlighted. Depending on how you move the sliders around when your on the levels dialogue you get a really wide variety of effects here. The sample just above is actually a bit rougher than I like, because the quick mask was a little harsh. Try repeating the steps, but this time, after you run the levels, blur the quick mask with the filter-blur->gaussian blur filter (I used 3).
You can also smooth out the mask on the levels dialogue itself by moving the sliders a bit further apart after you use the droppers to select what you want to be the darkest (not at all selected) and the brightest (completely selected). Or don't use the droppers at all, just slide the sliders until you can see that the parts you want to glow are selected, and the parts that create the definition (nose, eyelashes, etc) are masked with red. Here's what happened when I did that:
You could do this a hundred times and not have it end up exactly the same twice, so lots to experiment with here!
Softness
Here's another easy one. Put a duplicate copy of the original image on a new layer above it. Now use the noise->median filter, set to 5, to blur this layer. (you can also use gaussian blur, motion blur, etc, each with slightly different results). Now reduce the opacity on this layer to the desired level of softness. I used 40%.
This is another fun one to experiment with. Try setting that second layer to screen, and pumping the opacity up to 100%:
Duplicate that blurred, screen layer, and you get something even brighter:
See how this works? Just keep duplicating layers, experiment with different blends (screen, overlay, softlight, color burn are my favs), blur some layers, you get the idea. Here's what it looks like with that third layer from the last example set to soft light instead. The possibilities are literally endless.
Softness: method 2
Here's another trick I use an awful lot; it's a variation on the luminosity mask technique I discussed above, so if you've mastered that, this isn't going to be much different. Basically all the same instructions apply, except that instead of using the diffuse glow filter, you use noise->median or blur->guassian blur.
So start off with tbe basic image, and select the luminosity mask with control-alt-tilda, or by double clicking the RGB layer in the channels palette. Now you can switch to quick mask, and play with the levels as before, but we'll skip that step for now. Just use the default mask, control-H to hide the "marching ants", and pull up the noise->median dialogue box. Here's what a setting of 5 gives us:
And here's the opposite end of the spectrum, if you slide the slider all the way to 16:
You can also use gaussian blur or motion blur, but median is my personal favorite. Now, try it again, this time lets do that quick mask/levels step. So select the luminosity mask, than Q to quick mask, then control-L to level, move the sliders in from either end till your masking looks something like this:
Use a few of the "copy-layer set to different blending" tricks used above, and you can get something like:
Softness/glowiness: method 3
Okay, one more trick, this one a recent discovery of mine. Again, making use of my beloved luminosity mask. So what are you waiting for, you know the drill by now, select it! This time, right after you make the initial selection, do control-c to copy, and control-v to paste. Look at what you've done! You've just selected all the lightest parts of your base layer, and put it on a new layer of it's own. Set this layer to screen, and run a median filter on it (I used 7). It's a very subtle effect when done just once, but quite effective for cleaning up the grain on analog vid captures, and even improves digital caps like this one ever so slightly.
Now, flatten those two layers into one, and repeat the technique a few times more. Then use levels and saturation to play with the colors a bit. Here's what I got:
Starting to see what I mean by "the possibilities" are endless? All this techniques can be mixed and matched in so many ways, you're sure to get something interesting and different all the time, just by dumb luck...
Okay, one more similar trick. Go back to basic, select the luminosity mask, switch over to quick mask mode, pull up the levels dialogue, and this time slider the sliders so that most of the image is red, with just the very brightest highlights left clear (similar to the first quick mask screen show way above). Now back to regular mode, and create a new blank layer on top of the image. Fill the selection with white (or any other light color). Blur that layer with noise->median (I used 9). Set the blend to screen. You should get something like
If you want to keep going, try duplicating that new layer a few times. Two duplications (for a total of 3 layers above the original one) got me:
Setting the blend on the top 2 copies to overlay, and reducing the opacity on the original screened copy to 38% got me:
Okay, one more
This one I've devised from hints dropped by Val. I don't use it too often, but I figured I should give it a whirl for this demo. Start with the original image, and use the blur-smart blur filter. The settings I used were Radius: 17, Threshold:17.2, Quality:High, Mode; Normal. Which gave me:
Then, I duplicated the layer, set that to screen, and duplicated that 2 more times for a total of 3 screen copied. Flattened and used selective color, levels, and hue/saturation (or you can use an adjustment layer if you don't want to flatten... just control click on the "new layer" icon) to play with the coloring. And got:
I have no idea how Val gets such smooth results using the smart blur tool, I always get those little jaggies. (Maybe it's been improved in new version of Photoshop? I'm using 5) Which are cute, but not really my style... so I'll just duplicate the layer, run median on it, and reduce the opacity to get:
The other thing to do, as Val has been kind enough to e-mail me and explain after reading the above, is to use the blur tool (the one that looks like a drop of water, sharing the same tool button as the smudge tool and sharpen tool) to selectively blur away the jaggies. I tried it on the jaggy version from above, and here's what I got:
And that's all I can think of for now. Hope this helped someone! And if you're a photoshop wiz with another technique to share with me or just someone who stumbled across another way to do this through trial and error, I'm all appreciative ears and complements on your genius! e-mail me!...