Maybe Orton effect just like that, don’t tell you much or tell you get the hell out of here this is very complicated 😉 . Well, nothing is further from reality. The Orton effect has surely caught your attention more than once, although you may not have known its name.
What is the Orton Effect?
It is that effect of blur that you have seen many times in photographs, especially of landscapes, but also in portraits, which creates a certain mystery, dreamlike or pictorial effect similar to watercolors.
It is usual to always work in Photoshop, although in Lightroom similar results can be achieved. We will see how to do it with both programs.
Origin of the Orton effect
The origin of this photographic technique we owe to its author, Michael Orton that initially created the effect through the overlapping (sandwich) of several slides of the same scene. To do this, he used, logically, a tripod and then took two to three photographs.
One of them was the image with detail, where everything was in focus and up to 2 stops overexposed. The second/third were the slides of the colorwhere the same scene appeared out of focus and overexposed.
His goal is to emulate water paints and after him many have been inspired by his technique, luckily now in a much simpler way ;), or at least more comfortable.
These are original images of Michael Ortonthe creator of this technique, so you get a more concrete idea of what I’m talking about:
After this small approach to the effect, let’s see how to achieve it very easily in Photoshop.
Get the Orton effect in Photoshop
Photoshop is the most classic system to achieve this effect. If you browse the net you will see that there are many different ways to achieve this. I leave you one that I think is very simple and customizable to each person and image.
1. Choose a suitable image: landscapes and specifically forests with leaves, fallen leaves or scenes with a lot of vegetation such as fields, are good images with which to start testing this effect.
2. Open the chosen image in Photoshop.
3. Duplicate the background layer and name it, for example “Orton”.
4. On this layer we will apply the blur effect. To do this, with the «Orton» layer selected, we are going to Filters>Blur>Gaussian Blur.
5. Within «Gaussian blur» we will give it a value of 30. It should be quite out of focus, although without completely losing the information. The value will depend on the size of the sensor we have, but we can start here and modify it if necessary.
6. Then we’ll go to correct the highlights and shadows to give the image some of the contrast that we’ve lost by blurring it. You can do this from Image>Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast or from levels either curves.
To do this, turn up the lights and intensify the shadows.
7. Finally we would go to the opacity and we would give it the value that we like. It is not advisable to abuse this effect too much, around 10-15-20% opacity is enough, if it does not look very Photoshopped ;). But come on, what about tastes… you know :). In this case I have given the layer a 16% opacity.
With this, the result would be applied to the entire image and we would already have the image ready in terms of Orton effect it means. Then you could apply saturation adjustments or whatever you consider to finish polishing your image.
Now if you want apply it selectively As in my case, I don’t want it to be applied to the girl or to the foreground of the scene, what we have to do is delete it from those areas that we want to keep in focus.
8. To do so we will add a layer mask to our “Orton” layer where we are working on the whole effect. By painting over the areas that we want to isolate from the effect with the brush tool in black, we can erase the areas where we do not want to have the Orton effect.
Now we would have it ready.
This is the before (left) and after (right). As you can see I don’t really like to overuse the effect, but still I think you can see the effect in a subtle way. If you like it more powerful, raise the opacity and that’s it.
Final result in Photoshop.
Get the Orton effect in Lightroom
In Lightroom we don’t work in layers but we can achieve a similar effect with the blur and clarity tools.
1. Once you have chosen the image with the criteria that I mentioned, you have two options with which to apply the Orton Effect to the image.
- brush tool
- Gradient filter tool
With the brush tool We will select the entire area in which we want to apply this type of blur and we will leave the areas in which we do not want to apply it unpainted.
Instead, with the gradient Filter, We will select the entire image and later we will delete the areas in which we do not want to apply the blur.
Either of the two options is valid, although to show you some, I will teach you the degraded filter option.
2. Select the gradient filter and apply it to the entire scene (or if you prefer, paint the scene with the adjustment brush avoiding the areas you don’t want to blur).
In the selected areas we will work with the clarity, which we will leave at quite negative values around -60 or -70 and with the blur, which we will leave at values around -35 -30.
3. Check the result and fine tune the values based on your own taste.
4. Choose the areas you want to keep sharp if you’re working with the gradient filter and have the blur applied to the entire image. In my case they will be the girl and the foreground of the image.
5. With the gradient filter selected, go to «Brush»>»Erase» and erase the areas of the image that you want to keep in focus.
6. Adjust the highlights and shadows to give it more contrast to the scene, as well as some saturation or intensity so that the image is not turned off.
This would be my result in Lightroom.
Gallery
You already know that a picture is worth a thousand words, so here are a few images that have had the Orton effect applied to them. There is nothing written about tastes, although for me, less is more, it should not be abused.
Do you want more inspiration? take a look at this link 🙂 .
What do you think of this technique? Do you dare to try it with your own style? I think it’s a very interesting technique to add a pictorial halo full of magic to your landscape photographs, don’t you think? I read you in comments 😉