photoshop recipe sharing ~ day 2 ~ sweet & soft effect

as promised, i am back with another recipe.....  be sure to mouse over to see the before.

so let's get started.

day 2 ~ the sweet & soft effect...

the recipe steps are the same in Elements and full Photoshop unless otherwise noted:

Layer 1:
i duplicated the base image.
Applied a gaussian blur filter at 67 pixels. Lowered the opacity of the layer so i could see the basic outline of the image.

PHOTOSHOP: added a layer mask to the duplicate layer and used a black soft round brush set to around 45% to remove the blur from the 3 main dresses.
ELEMENTS: used the eraser tool set at about 45% opacity and soft round brush to remove the blur from the 3 dresses to reveal the base image below.

Then bumped the opacity of the layer back to 100% and assessed the image to make sure i didn't remove too much of the blur or perhaps not enough.
the result should be a dreamy blur in the background... drawing your eye to the sweet little dresses.

Layer 2:
Created a new layer.  Selected a soft round brush at approximately 35% opacity.  And selected a light grey shade from the image using the color picker and painted over the darker background areas.  Then applied a gaussian blur to that layer at about 37 pixels.
then adjusted the layer opacity to around 62%

Layer 3:
Added the 'uncle clarence' texture at soft light 100%.

Layer 4:
added a hue/saturation adjustment layer and clipped it to the texture layer....and dropped the saturation down to -100.

Layer 5:
Selected the adjustment layer icon at the bottom of the layers palette and then added a solid color adjustment layer in white set to soft light 100% opacity.

Layer 6:
Added a final hue/saturation adjustment layer and dropped the saturation down to -54.

you can find the 'uncle clarence' texture in today's 2 for offering...

see you tomorrow for day 3....

xxo,