The “soft focus” technique is pretty popular in late-80s and early 90s, as a way to show a dream-like effect on photographs. Back then, it was commonly achieved by using a “soft-focus” filter in front of the camera lens. Today, we can easily create this effect with Adobe Photoshop.

Note: This tutorial is written based on Adobe Photoshop CS3, however this technique should be able to be applied to any versions of Photoshop.

For those who doesn’t know what “soft-focus” effect is, it is something like follows:

Original Photo:

Edited Photo:

Want to know how can you obtain this effect? Read on! It is simpler than you think!

  1. First of all, you, of course have to start Photoshop and open the image that you wanted to apply this effect on.
  2. Once the image is open, duplicate the layer by clicking on the menu “Layer -> Duplicate Layer…”. For keyboard junkies, you may press Ctrl+J to do the same:
  3. Now go to “Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur…”:

    Set the value pretty high, to a point where the image is almost completely smudged:

  4. Now on the Layers palette, choose “Screen” as the blending option (make sure you choose this on the layer that you have blurred out):
  5. You’ll notice that the effect is too strong. To reduce this effect, adjust the layer’s Opacity until you get the effect that you want:
  6. And there you have it!

There are some further adjustments that can be done to make the photo better, but let’s save that for another time. If you have questions though, do ask!