With a soft-focus effect, it’s the highlights which become blurred and diffused.  When soft focus is created in the camera with a soft focus filter or lens, it is the whites, the highlights, which blur into the darker areas.

With traditional darkroom printing, when a soft-focus filter is used over the lens, the highlights of the negative are the clear parts of the film. These clear areas represent the shadow portions of the image. So with soft focus created at the printing stage, it is the shadow portions of the image which blur and spread into the lighter areas of the image.

The effect is reversed.
This would be the same with colour or black and white film.

The results can look very different and are achieved in Photoshop in different ways.

  1. Open an image, such as a portrait.
  2. Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur.
    The image should be over-blurred at this stage, so enter a high value like 30, although this can depend on the resolution of your image.
  3. Go to Edit > Fade Gaussian Blur.
  4. Change Mode from Normal to Lighten.
  5. The amount of blur can be controlled here, so reduce Opacity to 90%. OK.
    This is the type of effect achieved when a soft focus filter is used over the camera lens.
  6. Open the History palette and click on the Create new snapshot icon at the bottom of the palette.
  7. Still in the History palette, click on the Open state, which takes the image back to before the Gaussian Blur filter was applied.
  8. Use Ctrl + F / Cmd + F to reapply the filter.
  9. Go to Edit > Fade Gaussian Blur.
  10. Change Mode to Darken.
  11. Reduce Opacity to 80%. OK.
    This is the type of effect achieved when a soft focus filter is used over the enlarger lens when printing a negative.
  12. Open the History palette and click on the icon at the bottom to create a snapshot of this image.
  13. Toggle between Snapshot 1 and Snapshot 2 to compare both images.

Either image can be saved while its history state is active.
One looks more romantic; the other can look more moody or with the right subject it can look sinister.

Different Blending Modes can really transform an image and produce interesting results, by changing the look and feel of an image.

Many more photoshop special effect tips can be found via Photoshop In A Day

Duncan Wherrett is an experienced professional photographer and Photoshop instructor.

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