Digital Photo Soft Filter Effect

Learn how to create a soft filter effect often seen in wedding photos with this simple trick used in Photoshop/Elements.

Here’s a neat little trick I’d like to show you on how to add a soft filtered effect to your photos, like the ones you would see on wedding images. You can enhance your photos for your scrapbook layouts and give them a really soft, beautiful effect.

I’m going to use this image of a lily pad just for demonstration purposes. It has some nice contrast in the image, with the light colored flower against a dark background.
I’m going to select all, copy andpaste, now we have two layers. On the top layer, I am going to select Blur under Filters and select Gaussian Blur.

I probably don’t want it blurred out that much, but I’m going to blur it so that it loses a lot of the definition in the image. You can see what’s going on – as you slide it. I’m using a low-resolution file just for demonstration purposes, so I don’t need to blur it as much as I would with a high-resolution file.

Click okay, and you have a nice blur. Next, under the layers tablets, select the layers options. For this one, I’m going to scroll down and select lighten. What you see here are just the soft highlights showing up on the image.

Now, you can hide that layer to see what the original looks like. See the difference? It adds a nice, beautiful effect to your image. Very simple.