Orton Effect -The Easy Way

Apr 4, 2009 by Matt Voran

The Orton effect is the result of taking two pictures, one underexposed image in focus, and overexposed image out of focus, and then combining those negatives in the darkroom when making prints.  That’s how it was done in the film days.  Now, thanks to the digital era and our friend Photoshop, we can simulate this effect with one image.  Additionally, many digital cameras have the ability to overlay two images, so you could do the Orton effect directly on your camera!

The Orton effect is a really great and simple way to give your photos a really great soft focus effect that can really transform an image into something amazing.  My method is a tiny bit different than others and I think it takes a lot of the guess work out and allows you to achieve the best results in the fewest steps.  Here is how I do it.

1. Open up an image that you think is a good candidate for the effect, almost all images can be but some are better than others.   I like it on portraits (headshots mainly), lush landscapes, and flowers.  For the purposes of learning the effect, its not all the important though, so use whatever you want.
2. The first thing you want to do, which I always recommend for ANY Photoshop work, is duplicate your original layer (the one that says”Background”)  You should always do this just to keep the original in the file as work, you might want to go back to it sometime.  Do this now by highlighting that layer and pressing CTL+J. 
3. Now that you have your copy, we are going to duplicate it AGAIN.  Yes again.  CTL+J.
4. Select the top layer, your newly duplicated layer, and change the blend mode to “Screen”.  
5. Now duplicate that layer two or three times, depending on how light your image gets.  You want it to get really light but not so bright that you start to lose detail.  Three times usually does it for me, but maybe two for an image that was really light to begin with, four times for a really dark image.
6. Okay.  So enough layers for now.  What you want to do is select those top two or three “screen” layers, and merge them.

7. Now change that merged layer to “Multiply” mode.

8. With that layer still selected, we need to apply the effect, which is Gaussian Blur.  So go to your filter menu and do it!

9. Adjust the blur effect to taste, its going to be different for every image, and also is dependant on the actual image size.   I am working with an 800×600 image so less than 10px does the trick for me, but if you are working on a really large image like 3000px or something, you will have to use a lot more.  This is where my tutorial is easier than most, because many tutorials have you change the blending mode to “multiply” AFTER this step, which means your guessing on how much blur to apply.  Doing it this way, means you can SEE the effect as you change the blur amount.   Once you have it like you want, go ahead and apply the blur by pressing “OK”.

   

10. That’s it!  You may want to adjust the levels of the original layer (well actually the copy of the original layer) to lighten things up a bit if you like.  Once you get that done, go ahead and merge the top two layers and make any final adjustments you like.  Here is the final image compared to the original! 

11. Hope you enjoyed the tutorial, now that you know how to do it you can bust this effect out in a matter of minutes.  The key to using this effect is moderation, don’t over-do it and you will have professional looking images time and time again.