Sheesh, couldn't think of a decent title that would say what I wanted to say! lol! I was going through some of our Disney pictures recently, and wanted to make them pop a little more. Everything is so bright there at the park, and some of those quick photo ops don't give much time for setting up the perfect photo shoot. I remembered something I had tried before in Photoshop and I loved the results. Then I thought I would share with y'all in case any of you haven't tried it.

Here is the photo as it originally looked:




After I opened the photo, I created a copy of it by dragging the photo icon in the layers palette to the Create New Layer icon.

I added a Gaussian Blur with a radius of 3.0 to the top photo layer. Then I set the Blend Mode for that layer to Soft Overlay and played with the layer opacity a little. I prefer it on about 80%. Check out how vibrant the photo is! (Can someone tell me if the Blend Modes are the same or different in PSE?)



I checked out some of the other Blend Modes and some of them are pretty interesting too.

If you set the Gaussian Blur to a radius of about 8 or 9, then set the Blend Mode to Overlay and the Opacity to about 85%, you get more of a dreamy, vibrant look. Like this:




Anyone else have any little fun techniques you like to use to "dress up" some of your photos?

Tracy

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*Some people only dream of angels; we held one in our arms.*
Remembering Jacob March 8 - 9, 1996
Our Angel: http://sids-network.org/fp/jacob.htm

I'm totally jealous that you got to see Mulan. I looked all over for her when we were in DW but couldn't find her!

The photo's look great!

Awesome tips Tracy!! Thanks so much for sharing!!

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I gotta try this I'd love to ZIPPY up!?! some photos. They really pop with your technique! I'm going to try! Thanks for sharing!

Excellent Tracey!

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It can be addicting--going through your photos to see which ones to do this to. lol! Actually, the original picture isn't too bad, but I really wanted to see if it would look more Disneyish. This works well for pics that look kind of dull.

Sagebug, we happened to just be in the right place at the right time. We were looking for something totally different, and Mulan came out right then. We only had a few kids in front of us in line. Some of those lines for characters get crazy long don't they?

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*Some people only dream of angels; we held one in our arms.*
Remembering Jacob March 8 - 9, 1996
Our Angel: http://sids-network.org/fp/jacob.htm

Thanks so much for sharing! I've been wanting to learn how to do something like that. Great photo, btw!

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using the blending layers can produce some great results - especially using masks to further control it.
Although I don't care for the oversaturated look to photos (and actually have toned down my controls in the camera), you might be able to get this look/feel directly in your JPG's by just turning up the saturation values say +1 or 2...

Also, if you happen to shoot RAW, you can do this very very easily during conversion in most of the RAW conversion software.. I use RSP and just tune up vibrance +3 when I'm looking for the colors to pop a bit more... works great!

Thx for sharing!