How to make your pictures glow: the Orton Effect
Have you ever seen an impossibly dream-like landscape photo? One with a slow burning, glowing sunset. That’s really the best way to describe it, the image looks as if it’s glowing. You might be thinking, “wow, I wish I was that good and could take a picture like that.” Sure, great photographers are capable of creating fantastic compositions and take advantage of great light, but a lot of the magic occurs in the post processing. Post processing is really where a photographer will accentuate and achieve that glowing look.
This glow added to a photo is known as the Orton Effect. Technically, the Orton Effect is combining two different images of an identical scene to create one final image. That’s really the basic concept behind this glowing effect, we will use two different images to create our final product. Now, before we go any further I want to mention a slight disclaimer. Please don’t add this effect to all of your photos, it will look silly. In my opinion, the orton effect creates a soft, dreamlike image. I love to use it with soft glowing sunsets and waterfalls. When used with waterfalls I think it produces an image that looks like it is straight out of a fairytale. To explain this technique I’m going to walk through an example of how I post processed this image of Aysgarth Falls that I captured last summer. Below is the unedited image.
It’s a beautiful waterfall, and I love the way that the long lens here compressed all of the smaller waterfalls in the foreground. Going into this edit I knew there were a few things I wanted to see. First, I wanted to get rid of those people standing at the top right of the waterfall. Second, this was a gloomy, english day, I needed to add some pop of color to the image. Last and most importantly, I wanted to add an orton effect and create that dreamlike look. Below is the finished image. Follow along until the end to learn how to create this look.
The first thing to do is import the original RAW file into Lightroom. Here I’ll make a few color adjustments, correct my exposure, and recover some shadow and highlight information. Then it’s time to move the file into Photoshop. To do this, right click on the image →edit in →Adobe Photoshop 2020 (I have entire blog post about why this is so important, go check it out). As you can see in the image below, my exposure is in a good place, and the colors are starting to look better.
Now, make any necessary adjustments in Photoshop. For this image, I’m going to further recover the sky, remove the people, and add some color pop. Giving us something like this.
We have now made our Lightroom adjustments and our basic Photoshop adjustments, and it is now the moment we have all been waiting for, the Orton Effect. The first step is to make sure that you are selected on your top layer. We are going to create a merged visible layer above that layer (this will be our new top layer). To do this on a Mac, hold down [Command+Option+Shift+E]. The next step is to add a Gaussian Blur to that merged visible layer. To do this make sure you are selected on the merged visible layer. Head up to the top and select Filter →Blur →Gaussian Blur. Set the blur somewhere around 30.
This will make your picture look like an out of focus mess. Not to worry, we aren’t finished yet. To create this dream like look, we only want the blur to be showing in the brighter areas of the image. There are two ways we can do this. The first is the most basic, but won’t result in the best outcome in my opinion. Create a layer mask for the blurred layer, and use Command+I to invert the layer mask. Then use a white paintbrush to paint in the blurred layer to the brighter areas of the photo. The second way, which is the method I use, is using a software called Lumenzia. This software will allow you to create precise layer masks with gradients based on the brightness of the photo. These are called Luminosity masks. This will basically apply the blurred layer to the brightest areas for you.
Once the blurred layer has been masked into the bright areas of the image, you are nearly finished. Chances are the orton effect is looking slightly heavy handed at the moment. I suggest bringing down the layer opacity to around 40%. This will make the image look more professional, and the orton effect less obvious. The final product is a dreamlike landscape, brought to you by the orton effect.
I hope this was helpful in explaining how to create and edit with the orton effect. If you have any questions or comments be sure to reach out, and I will get back to you right away. As always, if you like this technique and use it in your photos, be sure to tag me on Instagram @mashley.media. Also, be on the lookout for my new YouTube Channel. I’m currently in the process of putting together some tutorials and I’m excited to share them with you in video format. Talk to you all on Tuesday!
