The Sprague Lab

Yeah! Welcome to PS Friday! I hope you like this week’s edition.
Today you’ll add a cool dream-i-fied/handtinted look to a photo, like this:

Cool, huh? But wait, here was my original, totally unedited except scaling and saving for web:

And I need to mention that I adapted these instructions from a tutorial over at PSDTuts.com, and I owe them some thanks for this. :)
Ready? Here we go:

Creating a Dreamy/Handtinted effect on a Photo

1. Open your photo.
2. Duplicate your photo onto a new layer and hide the original.
3. Click on the layer with the duplicated photo, and change the blending mode to Soft Light (this is located in a dropdown at the very top of the layers palette).
4. Duplicate the photo again.
5. Click on the lower of the two photo copies. Desaturate this layer (Image > Adjustments > Desaturate OR in Elements - Enhance > Color > Remove Color).
6. Copy the desaturated layer two more times.

Your layer stack should now look like this:




From top to bottom, the layers are:


Color photo, soft light blend


Desaturated copy, soft light blend


Desaturated copy, soft light blend


Desaturated copy, soft light blend





Okay, a couple more steps to really dream-i-fy the photo.


7. Change the second layer to Screen blend
8. Now, choose layer 2 and do a Gaussian blur (start out with 10 px and see where that takes you � go more or less depending on whether you�re working with a 300 dpi photo)
9. Choose layer 3 and do a Gaussian blur of slightly more than you did in layer 2. (Just play with the slider until you get an effect you like)
10. If you want to create a layout from here, simply link all your layers together and drag them onto your layout.
    OR
11. If you want to add the grunge mask, flatten all the visible layers (Layer > Merge Visible).

Now you can open up my grunge mask from Photoshop Friday #3 and apply it to the photo. I also filled in a bottom layer with black before saving.
Here’s another example:

Okay, little birdies! Fly free! Make dreaminess! Link me up when you create something! I can’t wait to see. :)

Oh, and let’s seeee…. freebie freebie freebie..

Here’s a great one, from the Dover 1500 Decorative Ornaments book/CD again.

Remember, when you have your brush tool selected you can choose the [ and ] keys to make your brush larger or smaller before you stamp it down.

Have fun!