Infinite Alchemy - www.infinitealchemy.com

SOFT GLOW

Say you wanna make the picture glow a little bit. Here's a couple tricks you can follow in brightening up that picture.
Here's the way I learned it with a few changes I've made to the steps.

1.) pick a photo and open it up. MAKE SURE THE LAYER IN THE LAYER PALLETTE IS UNLOCKED! I can't stress that enough. If you don't know how to do that, here's what you do, click and drag the locked layer to the button next to the trash button in your layer pallette. A duplicate will appear as an unlocked layer above the locked one. Take the locked layer and click and drag it to the trash button.
2.) Image >> Adjustments >> Brightness /Contrast..
3.) Set the brightness at 10 and the contrast at 30 (but if it comes out orange-like... try around 20-25 -ish or just play around)
4.) Click Ok. Now, Filters >> Blur >> Gaussian Blur...
5.) Set it at 2.8 or 3.0
6.) click OK. Now Edit >> Fade Gaussian Blur...
7.) Set it at 40%-50% (whatever you feel is best) .. Click OK. and you're done!

Here's the alternative way I've came up with.
1.) Pick a photo and open it up. Again, make sure it isn't unlocked and as mentioned in the photo below, there are two tricks to making this technique successful: 1.) Make sure the photos are of high quality and not grainy and 2.) make sure the photos aren't too bright to start with. We need to make sure these criteria are met because if they aren't, they have a tendency to ruin the effect of the photo in the end... almost as though you've made the quality of the photo worse. Also, if the photo is bright to begin with, that'll be a problem as by doing this tutorial, you'll be effecting the contrast of the photo. Almost ALWAYS the photo will be about 2x brighter than the start if not more.

2.) Next, duplicate the layer by clicking and dragging the layer in the layer pallette to the button next to the trash button.

3.) With the duplicate layer selected and on top of the original layer, go to Filter >> Blur >> Gaussian Blur. Change the radius to 5.0, which will blur the photo if not completely, but damn near close to doing so.

4.) With the duplicate layer STILL selected, on the layers pallette, go to the layer effect pull down menu and choose "Hard Light" (or choose "Overlay" or "Soft Light" depending on the intensity of the photo as a result of either).

5.) Click OK and you're done. This is what your result should look like. It's a bit intense and yes, the photo was a bit bright, but it's not so intense that it's overwhelming. Though some may beg to differ, it's true. Try brightening up the photo FIRST then doing the effect, you'll see what I mean when I say, "overwhelming."

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