Orton effect - Adding a glow and dreamy effect to landscape photos

Hey guys, in this video, we're going to show you how the Orton effect can add some glow and atmosphere to your landscape photos. So the Orton effect is one of those really popular, uh, post-processing tricks and tools that a lot of landscape photographers are using right now. And in this video, I wanted to show you a couple of different ways to add the Orton effect to your shot and kind of show you what it does and how I go about using it in my landscape photos. Uh, so here we have this shot of the Palouse. This is where I live. This is taken from Steptoe Butte. Awesome place. If you've never been, you gotta go. So I've already done a couple things to this shot, uh, straight out of camera where it looked like this, obviously very flat, lacking, lacking contrast. So the first thing I did was I added a couple of contrast adjustments and then I added this shot here where I basically just, um, added some highlights to the top of these hills using a luminosity mask and some paint. So the next thing that we need to do is create a merged copy of our shot as it is. And so the way I'm going to do that is I'm going to go control shift, alt E. So, and that would be command option, command option, shift E. That's what it would be on Mac. So now that just gave us this merged down copy of the current state of our photo. So now the next thing that we need to do is we need to blur this layer and we're going to go up to filter, blur, Gaussian blur. And the amount that you blur your shot is going to vary on a couple of things. It's going to vary on the look that you're going for. If you want really ethereal and dreamy, you want to go with a larger radius. If you're dealing with a high megapixel camera, you're also going to need a larger radius because you're dealing with a larger shot. So this was taken on a five D mark three 22 point something megapixels. I'm going to go like in the 25 to 30 area probably for the shot. Let's go 33 hit. Okay. And now you're done. Now you have a really blurry photo. No, not really. So the next thing we need to do is add a whole bunch of contrast to this because what the Orton effect does is it blurs the highlights into the shadows and vice versa. And that gives the highlights kind of this glowy feel to it. So in order to do that, we need to add a bunch of contrast and really make those highlights pop. So what I'm going to do is with this layer selected, I'm going to go up to image adjustments levels. I like to use levels rather than curves just cause it's simpler, easier. You can use whatever you want. So I'm going to grab this right side and bring it to the left and I'm going to go to where my highlights are almost getting blown out, something like this. And then I'm going to grab the center one and take it towards the right. That's just going to add a whole bunch of contrast in the mid tones and the highlights. And it's okay if it looks, you know, way over the top because we're going to lower the opacity of this particular layer and just subtly bring it in. So, and I want to err on the side of my highlights being really hot, really spicy, spicy highlights and hit okay. And now what we need to do is we're going to lower the opacity of this layer all the way. And now we're going to let our eyes adjust because we just assaulted it with a whole bunch of color and a whole bunch of contrast. So let our eyes adjust to the way the photo is currently. And then we're going to slowly bring this opacity up. Typically in my photos, I like it to be around 10, maybe even a little bit lower, 10%. Um, for the sake of this tutorial, we're going to go a little higher, just so you can see what it looks like. I'm going to bring this up to about 15 and you can see all the dreaminess and atmosphere adds to it. I guess dreamy is the best way to describe it. It just makes those highlights glow. And 15 is definitely too much. I'll go down to like 10. And I think that that is okay. If we turn this off and on, you can see the difference that that makes. It just really softens the really fine sharp details. Um, it's kind of like the opposite of the clarity slider in a way. It's, you know, this, this is kind of like those, uh, 1990s, uh, glamor portraits, you know, where everything's all glowy and glamorous. Um, it's kind of like that only in a landscape shot. And what it does is it just kind of adds this kind of a theory illness to it. I recommend using this in a very tasteful way. Keep the opacity under 10% and you're going to get some decent results. Now, let me show you another way of doing it. This is the way that I normally do it, but there's another way if for those of you that have the Nick color effects pro bundle. So I'm going to go ahead and delete this layer. And now I'm going to go up to my selective tool that comes with the Nick color effects pro. This is a free tool. If you go to Google, do a search for N I K, um, effects, you'll find it. Uh, and one of the things that comes in the Nick color effects pro for, um, when you open this up, you have all these different, uh, plugins that you can do, and there's some pretty crazy ones here, but one of them is called daylight, I believe. Where is it? Oh, it's called sunlight. And when you do that, you can see that it's kind of this glowy, similar kind of thing. If we turn it off and on, you can see what it's doing. It's doing a very similar thing, only it's also warming it up a little bit. So what I like to do is I like to overdo it, add a bunch of brightness, add a bunch of contrast, something like this light strength, maybe, maybe not light strength. I need to maintain the contrast, something like that. I'll hit. Okay. And then doing the same kind of thing. I'll just, uh, blend it in using a lower opacity and that lower opacity will give you control over how much of this effect you're actually using. Um, that's, that's the benefit to working in layers and Photoshop as opposed to in light room is that you can decide later that, you know, I really overdid it on that third layer or whatever, my dreamy layer. So you can just back off the opacity and you can dial it in. So here we are a lower, the opacity of this, it's not nearly as strong effect as the previous one was. So I can use it like 50% and that looks pretty good to me. Okay. So the last thing that you're going to want to do, um, flatten it if you choose to save it, go back over into light room, and then you need to add another layer of sharpening because we did blur it. So just sharpening it a little bit. One more time. We'll bring the definition back to the, to the hillsides and stuff. And you, you might ask yourself, well, what's the point in blurring it if you're going to sharpen it again later on. And it's more complex than that because we did more than just blur, you know, just soften the details. We blurred those highlights into the shadows. And by doing that, it adds this glow. We can still sharpen it and maintain that glow. All right. Thanks so much. Hopefully this has been interesting for some of you that are interested in the Orton effect. If you have any more questions, comments, or anything, you want to see more of my videos, go over to nickpagephotography.com and I'll see you in the next video. All right. Catch you later.