TUTORIAL #4 - THE SOFT AND FLUFF LOOK

This tutorial will cover the use of Gaussian Blur and Layering techniques to get that soft and fluffy (as I call it) look that is soooo popular around town. We'll first start with the separate images that will be used in this example. Your base image will be any picture with some nice colors that you have. For this lesson I will be using a picture I had lying around that had some nice color to it (see lower left). The first step is to blur this image down so that only the colors will be distinguishable. In your filter drop down menu select Blur, then Gaussian Blur. Set the radius to a position that leaves nothing but the blurred colors. For this picture, I used a setting of 13 (see right). This will get you an effect that looks like the the picture at left. This will be your background image. Next, you will need to select a facial photo to overlay on top of the background you just created. For this picture the only thing I needed was the body and not the white background. You will need to select the white areas using the magic wand, inverse the selection and cut the body out of the picture you are using. After this is done you can paste this cutout as a layer on top of the background. Once you have pasted your head shot over the background, it will look something like the photo on the left. As you can see, it's still not quite done. What you will need to do next is to change the layer mode to overlay and adjust the opacity down to a level that you like. One more thing: You will notice in this example there is a rough edge at the bottom where the facial photo is not as long as the background. You can either crop the image to the size of the facial photo or add a layer mask and do a fade to transparent to soften the hard edge. After you have toned down the overlay opacity, you will then get something like the photo on the left. In this example, I chose to use the layer mask and fade to tranparent to fade the bottom of the facial photo to blend in with the background. Plus, if you add some more layers of things in the background and fade the opacity you'll be able to get a multi-layered look like the finished product of the photo on the right. tutorial index