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Romantic Glow

Photoshop Tutorial

In this tutorial we will learn how to create a romantic style glow around a person in a photograph.

1. Open the image you want to apply your effect to:

2. Duplicate the background layer (Ctrl+J) and name new layer "blur":

3. Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. The trick here is not to be afraid to overdo it - we'll change the blending mode in the next step and the blur will not be so prominent. It took me few tries but I finally got the effect I was looking for with blur radius set to 3 px.

4. Now go to Layers palette and set Blend mode to Lighten. That'll take care of most of the excessive blue effect we've applied in the previous step, leaving image with nice soft glow.

5. We are almost done now! The only thing is when I zoom in to the face, I can see that some of the small details (especially eyebrows and eye lashes) on the picture lost depth and look sort of like a painting rather then a photograph:

6. It is easily fixed! Go to Layers palette and click on the icon "Layer Mask". Select black fill color, choose the brush you'll be most comfortable with and paint over the areas you want to "come out".

7. And now we are done!