HOW TO CREATE ORTON EFFECT

In today’s article and video, I want to show you different techniques of how to create the Orton Effect on Photoshop
If you like to give that dreamy, magical effect, that glow and special shine to your photos. This video is for you.

I’ll explain all the steps but it’s best to follow the video for a better understanding.

The first thing we’re going to do is duplicate the layer with Crtl J or by lowering the layer and putting it on top of duplicate layer. This way we won’t affect the original layer and we’ll work on a new one.

Orton Effect 1

Now we’re going to go to Filter / Blur/ Gaussian Blur and give it between 10 px to 40 pixels, depending on the photo and the megapixels of your camera has. The higher the quality, the more. Then we put the layer in soft light blend mode and play with the opacity until the desired effect is achieved.

Orton Effect 2

We are going to repeat exactly the same thing but in this case when we duplicate the layer we are going to convert it into a Smart Object. The reason for this, is because in this way we will have control at all times of the effect we are giving it. Not only can we play with the opacity of the layer, but also, we can change, as many times as we want the gaussian blur we are applying.

I recommend you to try different blend modes to see other results. Overlay will give you more saturation and contrast. Soft light a softer effect…

Special tip to Orton Effect 2

Now to further enhance this effect what we can do is add a white layer next to it and paint in black where we don’t want the effect to be visible. Or even better a mask of luminosity 1 and apply it to the mask. This way our effect will only be applied to the lights and not to the shadows.

Orton Effect 3

Duplicate the layer Crtl/Alt/Shift/E this time the layer should be in normal blend mode and go to Filter/Blur/Gaussian Blur and give between 15 to 40px we give Ok and now on the same layer we go to Image/Brightness and Contrast.

We give 8% of brightness and 70% of contrast and we lower the opacity of the layer until we reach the effect we like. Normally something between 8 to 20%

Orton Effect 4

In this case we are going to complicate even more the way to make this effect.

We will duplicate the layer, change it to overlay mode and add gaussian blur 30px, lower the opacity of the layer. We duplicate this same layer and change the blend mode to Screen and go reduce the opacity of the layer.

Are you following me till here? Don’t worry if this sounds a bit confuse. In the video below you can follow all this steps very easy.

Special tip to Orton Effect 4

If you want to perfect this last orton, what we can do is the first layer in overlay mode we apply a mask of luminosity one and on the top layer in screen blend mode a mask of shadows one. With this tip you will have probably one of my favorite orton Effect.

Orton Effect 5

And to finish but not last (in some other article I will show you some other way using Photoshop plugins) We are going to duplicate the layer Crtl/Alt/Shift/E add Gaussian Blur of 35px reduce opacity to about 14% and on the same layer go to Image/Leves or Ctlr/L and we will put to the right the shadows, to the left the highlight and also darken a bit the midtones. With this we will give more contrast to our Orton Effect and a very nice touch