From the course: Photoshop for Designers: Filters

Combine Diffuse Glow and Iris Blur - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop for Designers: Filters

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Combine Diffuse Glow and Iris Blur

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- [Instructor] Here I'm going to use the diffuse glow filter in combination with the blur gallery to create this ethereal quality to this already rather strange image. Let's switch to the starting point. And the first thing I want to do is, as always, convert my background layer to a smart object. Right-click and choose convert to smart object. Now I'll come to the filter menu. And, in terms of diffusion, we have a couple of different options. One is to come to stylize and diffuse. But in this case I'm going to go to distort and choose diffuse glow. I can increase the graininess or the glow amount. And the clear amount, you can see that we can slide that from one side to the other. I'm actually going to go with the default values here. I'll hold down command or control, my cancel key will become default. Click on that and then click okay. Now to really control how much of this filter is applied, I'm going to change the blending mode of the filter. And I'll do that by double-clicking on the blending mode badge. One of two options will work here. Overlay or soft light. For a more subtle effect, choose soft light. But I'm going to go for a stronger effect by choosing overlay and then reducing the opacity slightly to 80%. Now what I want to do is slightly blur the background, which is currently a bit too focused. And I'll do this by coming to the filter menu, to blur gallery, and choosing iris blur. Now with iris blur, I will get this elliptical shape which I can adjust. Let's increase its size. I can also change its shape by clicking on this square at the top right. And I'm actually going to go for more of a rounded rectangle than an ellipse. I can dial in the amount of blur right over here with the onboard control or with the slider. And they will both get you to the same place. I'm going to go with the value that we currently have of 15 pixels. When I mouse over the shape, we can see that we have these four points and I can drag these in to make a more subtle transition between the more in focus of the image and the blurred portion of the image or move them out for a more abrupt transition. If I want to adjust any of these independently, I can hold down the option or alt key as I do that. One other thing I'd like to do here is save the mask I just made with this shape and with the amount of blur that I'm using to a channel. I'll come and check that option and then click okay. I'm going to use that channel to de-saturate the background. I'll come to my channel's panel, command click, to load the blur mask as a selection. Come back to my layers and down to my adjustment layers, where I will choose hue saturation and then move the saturation slider to the left. And you can see that as I'm doing that the colors in the background are becoming de-saturated. So that's how we can use a combination of diffuse glow, blur gallery, and then a selective de-saturation to create this effect.

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