Soft Lighting Abstracts [Very Easy]

This is probably the easiest thing you can do to make or break an image. The soft light technique.

1. Lets start out. Whatever you are soft lighting, open it up. I'll just use this.


2. Duplicate the layer. (Image > Duplicate) Now put the second layers mode on Soft Light.


3. Now go back to the first layer. Go to filter > blur > gaussian blur. This filter is the backbone of this tutorial. You have to fiddle with it to perfect it. Too much will be spread out, too little will make it look horribly blurred. It has to be right in the middle. On this one, I used 3.0.


Thats pretty much it. This is the full final product of this image


This is a great technique that works on photos too! Try also using the select tool with some feathering for some point blurring. It's quite a useful tool