On this video tutorial Aaron Nace from Phlearn shows how to create a very soft and dreamy look to an image in Photoshop.
When you have soft light sources (white images are ideal) you have a good candidate for creating the sort of soft dreamy image that we will demonstrate in this video.
We start with a second layer (which we turn into a smart object) we add an iris blur to draw more attention to the subject which is somewhere in the center of your image. Nace suggest zooming out and increasing the blur by playing with the ring inside (Nace also suggest using just a small amount of blur and not going to far with it).
Now we are going to blur the light in the image. We start by creating a selection out of the light in the photo by going to Select>Color Range and clicking on the light source using the eyedropper tool (use the fuzziness slider to choose – in white – just the areas with the light in the image).
We now have the light as a selection and we shall fill it with white and blur this layer and make sure everything is a smart object so we can change it later on if we decide that we want to. The final stage will be to play with color toning – add level new adjustment layer and play with the different colors adding a bit of yellow and blue (in this case).
You can find many more Photoshop video tutorials on LensVid’s Photoshop section (and you can find a lot more Phlearn videos on our special Phlearn subsection).