Soft focus photoshop is a quick and easy way to give your image the dreamy factor without having to have much experience with editing programs or complicated lens techniques.
You can complete this soft focus effect very simply and impress your frinds with a whole new edge to your images!
Often people make the mistake of over blurring an image to try to give it the soft focus appeal, sometimes though, this can leave your image looking, well, err, blurred!
Here we will show you how to change the soft focus of your image and simply create a whole new look.

So lets get started. Firstly we need to duplicate the layer. So, in the menu, go to Image, run down to duplicate layer, click on duplicate layer… click ok.

Next we are going to use the High Pass filter. Go to filter layer.. click filter… run down the menu to ‘other’ click high pass.
Choose a radius of around 10 pixels… click ok.
This will give your image a kind of grey effect, as seen in the image.

To get the soft focus effect we need to invert the high pass filter. Click Ctrl + I on your keyboard.
This is how the image should look after inverting.

Change the blending mode, click the arrow in the menu… change the blending mode to soft light.

And thats it! Simple soft focus photoshop!

This soft focus photoshop tutorial was brought to you by Ethiriel. We hope you enjoyed it. Check back soon for new photoshop techniques.

This effect has been around for just about as long as the camera. It creates a more artistic look for the photographer and vignetting can be seen on many pictures from wedding photography to fine art works.

Today we can add a vignette layer in photoshop with a simple mask on top of the original picture. It’s a very quick, easy and fun way to boost your image and draw the eye to the subject.

Follow our step by step tutorial to add a vignette to an image of your choice. Please check out the video tutorial further down as well!

The vignette effect can be created either by darkening the edges surrounding the picture, or quite the opposite, by lightening the edges, each method creates a ‘fade out’ effect and concentrates the viewer towards the centre of the picture, sometimes moving the focus on the area that we would like to be noticed the most.

Often it is used on portraits, but also lends itself to landscapes, buildings and even floral images.

Open the image you are wanting to use with the vignette effect.
Next you need to create a new layer, as shown, above the original image.

Making sure that you have your foreground colour set to black, go to ‘Edit’ and run your curser down the list and select ‘fill. This will flood your new layer with black. From the tools pallate, select the rectangular marquee tool and make the size of vignette border, as shown, to the size you are happy with. Position the ‘marching ants’ centrally withing the image.
When you are happy with the positioning for your border, select ‘feather’ from the menue and feather according to your preferance.

We used a feathering of only 10 pixels on this low resolution image, its always good to try different sizes until your happy with the effects.

Hit the ‘backspace’ key on your keyboard to remove the centre black, ie, all the colour that you don’t want in your image.
Finally you can reduce the opacity or your new layer to achieve the look that you want. Often vignetting is very faint though can be applied a little stronger if you want to.

And all there is left to do now if flatten and save your newly transformed image with its vignette effects!
It can be useful to save it under a different name should you want to re use the original image again in the future.

We hope you enjoyed learning how to add a vignette effect in our tutorial!

Vintage photo effects can add a whole new dimension to any image, here we’re going to apply a few simple techniques to age a photo. There are many different ways to make vintage photo effects but we’ll start with some simple color changes and texture layers built up slowly in this vintage photo tutorial.

Starting off with this image with a slightly vintage feel to begin with will add a little authenticity to the end result.

My first step towards giving this photo a more vintage appearance is going to be using the Match Color option. Before using this adjustment tool we need to create a new layer which will act as a color sample. I filled my layer with five colors, #FEFF00, #FF9999, #66CC00, #00FFFF, #66FF00. You can vary these colors depending on what result you are wanting and which colors are prominent in your original image. I chose these because they give a softer, more gentle result than the often used red and green.

After creating this new layer of colors you need to close the eye on the layer so it is no longer visible and reselect your main image layer again. From the menu go to Image –> Adjustments and choose Match Color. In this window you need to choose the color layer you have just created and hidden. As you can see on my image it was called layer 1.

Once the right layer is selected to draw color from set the color intensity to 70% and fade to 75%. Different images need different settings but this is a good place to start from to create a nice vintage photo effect.

In the next step we are going to use the Lens Correction filter to give us a quick vignette effect. So from the filter menu choose Lens Correction… and go to the custom tab. The only setting we want to alter here is the vignette bar, somewhere around -50 gives a vintage photo style vignette but play with the setting and see what you like.

Ok now onto Curves. We’re going to create a new adjustment layer for curves so we can get it just right for a vintage photo effect. For this vintage effect it’s best to do the red, green and blue curves separately, it helps to get the right color balance, slightly towards a cross processed effect without going all the way.

After this step you may need to adjust the saturation a little, sometimes it needs to be toned down a little after altering the curves.

Now its time to add some vintage texture to the image. The easiest and fastest way I have found to do this is by using the Render filter built into Photoshop. On a new layer we are going to choose Filter –> Render –> Clouds. Make sure your foreground colour is set to black and your background color is set to white. Once Photoshop had rendered you some clouds set the blending mode of that layer to overlay and the opacity of the layer to around 20%.

Now we need to merge all the layers we’ve created into one easy to manage layer. Duplicate this layer and use Filter –> Noise –> Dust and Scratches. Set the radius to 25pixels and the threshold to 0. Set the blend mode for this layer to Screen and turn the opacity down to between 25 to 50%. This gives a soft vintage effect to the image, not quite blurred but not too sharp.

Last of all is adding torn edges to your photo, you don’t need this step if you are happy with the results but if you want an extra vintage effect this is a good one! Create a new layer under your main image layer and fill it with a nice paper texture. Add a layer mask to this layer and cut arround the edges with a round brush to give the impression of vintage torn paper edges. Add a drop shadow in the blending mode for extra authenticity. Now you’ll need to apply a similar layer mask to the main image layer. Again using a round brush cut around the edge of the layer mask leaving just a little of the paper edge and drop shadow showing.

Here is our finished vintage photo effects, the finished image looks much softer and more faded than the original did. The vintage photo effects also changed to colors to a more old-fashioned looking image.

The most important thing I can stress to people asking for ways to prevent image theft is to make sure they never put high resolution images on the internet. The simple task of resizing your images is a huge way to stop image theft. It doesn’t take a lot to make sure your images can be seen beautifully on the internet but not be any use for high quality prints.

Another fantastic way to prevent image theft is to watermark your images or add your logo. If you choose to watermark your image keep in mind it should be quite subtle but very difficult to remove. A logo on the other hand can be more obvious, hopefully promoting yourself or your business, but is usually easy to crop out by determined image theives.

Many websites offer ways they claim you can combat image theft online, either by placing your images behind a transparent .gif or .png or by disabling the right click function. Both of these attempts to prevent image theft are far from perfect. The screencapture (PrtSC) facility on the pc is always avaliable to the user and limiting the right click option only serves to frustrate innocent visitors trying to browse your site. Users on Firefox, which is estimated to be more than 40% of internet users, are able to view the page source straight from the menu avoiding your image hiding techniques and any internet browser with javascript disabled is still able to right click your images.

Resizing Images

In Adobe Photoshop resizing your images for the web only takes seconds and is by far the most effective way to prevent your images being sold as prints without your knowledge or consent.

In the Photoshop menu choose Image –> Image size… and make sure you set the resolution to 72pixels/inch. This is perfect for viewing images on a screen but doesn’t work well for print. For my largest online images I like to keep my longest side between 640px and 700px depending on the image and where it is to be viewed. For extra ease Photoshop has an added option to “save for web and devices” under the save options. I like this option as again you can reduce the quality of the image a little to reduce the print quality and optimise it for fast web viewing.

I’ve also included a video to help you resizing your image and saving it for web and devices. THis really is the best option when preventing image theft online.

How to watermark pictures is an interesting topic which seems to have a huge range of opinions of how subtle or obvious the watermark should be. I personally cannot stand over the top watermarking and much prefer a more subtle aproach which is still impossible to remove but doesn’t detract too much from the original image. Who wants to buy an image which they are not able to view the quality of because a huge distracting watermark in the way? So we’ll be looking at the easiest ways to create a clear yet subtle watermark to protect your images online.

Watermarking images is a highly recommend method for preventing image theft. It is also very quick and simple to do using Photoshop or any other image editing software. Here is an example of an image with a subtle watermark.

This watermark effect was acheived by using Photoshop, creating a layer of white text over the top of the image, setting its blend mode to “overlay” and reducing the opacity of the text layer to 50%. This creates a nice subtle effect and obviously you are able to put anything you like in your text layer. We recommend putting your name or your website name in your watermark so anyone who likes your artwork can find you! I have to admit I have never tried cloning this style of watermark back out of an image but I really wouldn’t fancy trying it and I doubt many others would either!

Another option is to use a soft light blend mode like shown here, this gives a slightly different look to the one above and is nearly as subtle and just as difficult to remove. Either option is equally as acceptable on an image preview and both ways will help to prevent image theft for you. Your images can still be viewed and people may still download them but everytime they look at them, or show them to others your watermark can act as an advert for you.

Of course your watermark doesn’t have to be text based, it can be an image if you prefer, maybe a variation of your logo, as long as it identifies the image as one of yours. Experiment until you are happy with the look of your watermark on the image. Sometimes if your image is very pale you may need to try using black text or a dark image as a watermark though I still recommend making it quite faint so as not to distract too much from the beautiful artwork you spent hours creating!

Watermarking images provides great peace of mind for any artist wanting to publish their art on the web. We have other articles on image security online coming soon which we hope you will find useful in the fight against image theft! How to watermark pictures.

Here we are going to create a magical photo montage scene with a unicorn using several images to combine and merge into one background. So often I find I just don’t have that perfect image in my library, so being able to combine images in this way enables me to have endless backgrounds from just a few basic images.
At this stage I will say, the quality of your background images you choose don’t need to be perfect, they aren’t the main focus of the image, just a filler to your creation to give the overall feel to the final picture.

And so to begin with this photo montage Photoshop tutorial!

I find it helpful to start with the main focus of the overall picture first, so I have opened up an image from my computer of a white pony. Having already cut out the subject using the pen tool, explained in an earlier lesson, I positioned the pony towards one side of the new canvas. Composition, when working in Photoshop is just as important as the composition within the camera, its important that your layout works, is easy on the eye and not clashing with the other images you are going to use. So its always a good idea to have an idea in mind as to where you want to take your viewer as you begin.

The next thing to do is bring into the canvas a background image. Here I decided to use an image I had taken with a stream and some trees. There are some buildings in the background I don’t like being there, but for the time being I will ignore those, here I just want the water.
Having brought in my country background image, and placed it on the layer behind the pony, I centered and sized it to fit the entire canvas, using the free transform tool, (Ctrl T) All pretty straight forward so far.
You can see that the animal doesnt yet fui in with the overall picture at this stage, we can reposition the pony wherever we chose, using the move tool (Cnrl M) at the top of the tool box. We will no doubt have to keep coming back to the layer with the pony image frequently until we have the result we like.

Next I have opened up and imported a third image and placed it on the layer above the background layer, and below the horse, this photo is of some trees with a kind of sandy pathway.
The image was larger than the one you can see here with more dense trees to right side, I didn’t like the look of them as they seemed too dense and I was looking for something that gave the impression of light and airy. So using the eraser tool I removed half the photo, just by rubbing it out. Don’t rub away too much all at once, its best to keep coming back to a specific layer and taking away bits as you need to rather than rubbing out too much!

I duplicated the previous layer (Ctrl J) so I now had the same image of the trees, twice. Going up to ‘edit’ in the menu bar, and select free transform > transform > flip horizontal. I now have the duplicate image reversed on my canvas, all I need to do next is re position it and erase some of the bits I don’t want. I have chosen to expose most of the stream by exposing the contours it followed on the original background, this helps to avoid the feeling of symmetry that I just created.
You can see the buildings have been compleatly hidden by the new layer and we have a much more credible woodland for a unicorn to dwell in.

On a new layer, above all background layers, and below the pony, it was time to add in some mist and cloud to our photo montage, using Photoshop brushes I had previously made. This will create some atmosphere to the overall effect and make it a little bit magical.
Generally I find the best way to use the Photoshop brushes is to just kind of play, if I don’t get the effect I like, its easy to undo, or delete the layer (by dragging it into the bin at the bottom of the layers palette) But basically you just want to create the misty effect by applying the brush then rubbing parts away and adding more. I usually keep the brush opacity down quite low for this, around 25% or less, and the same for the eraser tool, as this prevents any harshness.

Now its time for the fun part!
By creating texture, using Photoshop brushes on a new layer, at the top of the layers palatte, above all other images. Another way this can be done is to import pre made textures from other sources, either ones you have created yourself, or there are many sites offering free downloads of various textures to be used in photo montage.
I created texture over the entire new layer and then reduced the opacity randomly with the erase tool, over the whole of the texture so some areas remained quite strong whilst other parts were more faded, avoiding a ‘blocking’ look to the image.
You can see I have also thickened and enhanced the main and tail of the unicorn here. How I do this will be explained more fully in a later tutorial, but the basics are easy and created with a small brush by using the smudge tool to lengthen the existing hairs.
I also gave the unicorn his ‘horn’ on the front of the face, this was achieved by drawing a long sort of cone and filling it with shading and highlights to make it look like a solid horn with shadows.

Lastly I added the tiny magical sparkles around the horn and feet of the unicorn to give it an ethereal and magical feel! And hey presto! That ends our Photo Montage Photoshop Tutorial.