Step 5: We’re now going to add a blurry accent to the photo that will bring out the colors of the photo and give a professional touch to the entire feel of the pic. Some people will refer to this effect as the Angelic Effect or Dreamy Effect etc… whatever they call it, I’m going to show you how I use a custom version of this trick in most of my photos!

First up, we need to create another copy of the background layer where our original photo is located. Click on the bottom layer:

Do a copy/paste and you will end up with two objects… a duplicate of the background object and a duplicate of the dark background layer:

Click on the duplicate dark background layer (in this case, it’s the one at the top) and delete it. You should only have 3 objects now… the background layer of our photo, the dark background object layer and then a copy of the photo as the top object:

With that top object selected, we want to explode those colors so they are ultra bright and exaggerated! We do this by opening the Brightness/Contrast/Intensity tool again and pumping the contrast and intensity to the max. Here’s the settings I used:

The only problem is that it intensified some of the texture of our backdrop and turned them into white speckles on the bottom of the photo. Use the pen tool and paint some black over top of the speckles:

Here’s how things look at this point with the speckles all painted over:

Time to blur our super bright layer! Open up the Gaussian Blur effect tool again and run another 3 pixel blur:

You can actually mess around with various pixel radius sizes on the blur for different effects. There’s no written rule that says you HAVE to use 3 pixels… I just like the way 3 works, but you can get more dramatic by going with a 5 or so instead.

Now, open up the properties window on this blurred object and reduce the opacity to 40%. It should now start looking pretty darn kick ass!

You now have the dreamy look on your photo and it’s really starting to look like a magazine ad! You can now see that the black background looks totally natural as though it was part of the photo all along and your colors are looking awesome! The only issue now is the blur has somewhat taken over the photo, so we’ll need to get some details back.

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