Saturday's Photo Scavengar Hunt - SOFT

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Photo Theme. Join the blogroll. Visit participants.
This weeks theme is SOFT.

OK, lets give this a try one more time. This week I thought I would take a picture I took in 2003 at an event that is part of the Kentucky Derby Festival of a Mom and her daughter. It is not a perfect picture but it is nice.



Now we all know that babies are SOFT so I suppose you could call this SOFT in its own right but that is not where I am heading. I am reading a book called "The Photoshop CS2 book for Digital Photographers" by my favorite photo retouching author, Scott Kelby. In it one of the techniques that he shows you how to do is turn any photo into a SOFT focus photo. I thought this week I would do that with this picture.

Step one after the open the picture is to copy the photo into another layer. With CS2 you press Ctrl-J but I would imagine you can do the same sort of thing with other programs. Now you apply a blur to that copied layer. In CS2 you select Filter and then Blur and finally Gaussian Blur. For High Res pictures you type 20 pixel. For Lower Res pictures you select between 6 and 10 pixel. This is what you end up with:



Now the final step you need to adjust the opacity of the new layer from 100 percent down to something much lower so the details show through. Scott suggests 50 percent and that is what I did here.



Ah now that is nice as it has added a nice SOFT focus to the picture. And that is my entry for this weeks theme ... SOFT. Oh and sorry for plugging the book and the Author but I thought if I am going to reveal one of his tips then it was the least I could do suppling links to his stuff in case you wanted to check him out.

Thank you very much for visiting. Have a wonderful weekend.