Soft highlights

[Carlosthetackle]

What's a good technique for getting nice soft highlights like a lot of professional photos do, while keeping the rest of the image sharp. Would this normally be done with lens filters or is there a good technique in Photoshop?

Cheers.

[cityboy_ca]

If you mean general softening, often the most flattering for portraits, I do the following (I use Corel PhotoPaint but this is also achievable in PhotoShop and others):

1. Crop, balance colours, set saturation and everything else you want to do before proceeding.
2. Copy the entire image to a new layer.
3. Apply Gaussian Blur at about 10% (you can play with this to get the best results, but 10% is a good place to start). You'll now have a blurred image sitting on top of your original image.
4. Set the layer opacity so the original image shows through... I usually start at about 50% opacity and tweak from there.
5. Once you have the effect you want, combine all layers.

As part of #3, I often warm up the picture a bit at the same time, changing the colour balance to add a bit of red and yellow. This is particularly effective for landscapes but can also produce pleasing results in certain portraits. Remember to add more warmth than you think is appropriate since you'll be lowering the opacity later on.

If most of the image result is what you want but it doesn't look quite right, try erasing some of the blurred image around the eyes before combining (I use an eraser brush with a very soft edge and high transparency) - when the eyes are sharp the whole image looks focused.