Glamour Effect...

Folks,

Here is a short description of how to get that professional 'Glamour' effect, used by many studios to give a soft focus & boosted saturation quality.

This effect works best for portraits with simple backgrounds, but is worth trying on other types of shots.

01) Open your image in Paintshop Pro...



02) We want to create a new layer that is a copy of our image.
Select 'Layers' from the top menu, then select Duplicate...



03) You should have the layers palette open, which normally sits around the bottom right of the screen.
If you can't see it press F8.

You should see a thumbnail of your original image with a layer title 'Background'
Above that, you should see a thumbnail of the duplicate layer we have just created titled 'Copy of Background'...



04) We now have to select the original image (background) by clicking once on the bottom thumbnail.
Anything we now do will only be applied to that layer.

05) Select Adjust from the top menu, then 'Blur' and then 'Gaussian Blur...'
Adjust the Radius setting to 20, and then click OK.
We have now added some blur (softness) to the bottom layer (our original).

06) We now have to select the Copy layer, but this time Double-click the Copy of Background thumbnail, as we want to bring up the Layer Properties dialog box. This allows us to select what way we want the two layers to be blended together, and also the intensity of that blend by adjusting the Opacity value...



07) For this effect we will select 'Overlay' from the 'Blend Mode' dropdown menu, and we will leave the Opacity value at 100%...



08) That's it! A simple little technique that IMHO gives great results.

At this stage, you will still have two active layers. The final thing to do is to merge these two layers back into one image.
Select Layers from the top menu, then 'Merge', and then 'Merge All (Flatten)'.

You should notice that there is now only one thumbnail in the Layers palette, which is your merged final image. You can save this image as a new filename, and Undo right back to the original image if you want to try other settings.

Some things you can try, is to tweak the values for the Gaussian Blur, and/or the copy layer's Opacity setting.

Hope you have fun with this one.

Rgds,
Howard