Soft Focus and Light: a tutorial with Jennifer Love Hewitt

Thought twas time for another tutorial starring JLH.

In this one I’m concentrating on soft focus and smooth lighting … call it glow if you want … I don’t care … main thing is aiming for a smooth play of highlights and shadows combined with a soft focus without loosing too much of the detail.

I’m gonna look into soft light, overlay, color and luminosity blending … some brushing in layer masks and using gaussian blur to … blur of course but also sharpening … yep that’s right you can use blur to sharpen things up.

To make it visual, this is what we’re gonna do:
From this original image to this

Tutorial is split into 2 parts (01.png to 08.png and 10.png to 12.png) ‘cause it can’t be done in one single .psd file.
I also had to upload the images in .png format so you can see the semi-transparent parts of the images as I go along; source image and output image are .jpg’s.

Although there’s quite some understanding behind it, it isn’t a difficult process and you don’t need intermediate or advanced skills to follow it through … though I always recommend coffee and sigarettes before ya start reading it.

Enjoy …

Part 1:






Part 2:



Another example using different settings and parts of this tutorial:

From this original image to this and some cyano type B/W

 

If you got FireFox open them in 2 tabs and switch between them then you will see the difference.

 

Yeah, there are a lot of differences, but its the overall effects changes that are important.
That being said, remember that this is but part of many steps to create an image

 

The 2nd example shows how to use soft focus and layer masks to smoothen the skin in a more natural way than some awfull plugins like Topaz do.
If you read the tutorial you'll understand.
So the difference with the original is the skin smoothening ... if you don't see that ... I recommend some glasses.

 

a tutorial with Jennifer Love Hewitt great choice!

cool effect TCF, TY

 

Good job TCF!

 

Thanks:d