Photography (Slightly Beyond) Basics – Creating the look of old soft focus lenses in Photoshop

by Mickey Rountree

In my last article I discussed some older soft focus lenses. In this article, I’ll you how to get a similar look in Photoshop. There are advantages of creating the look in Photoshop rather than with a soft focus lens. First there is no need to buy a new (old) lens, so it’s free. Second if you shoot the image in soft focus and decide you would prefer it sharp, there’s no way to sharpen it. Third you have much more control of how much flare there is, and you can vary the softness on different areas of the image.

When these articles are converted to PDF and sized for the newsletter, the resolution and quality of the images is seriously degraded. If you would like to read the article and see the images as I did, you can see this article on my website at this link.

https://mickeyrountree.smugmug.com/Articles/Basic-Photography-Series/

Here is the sharp image we’ll start with.

Begin by opening the sharp Image in Photoshop. Create a copy of the base image with Ctrl-J(CMD-J for Mac. Select filter/blur Gaussian Blur and select a low radius like 8-10 pixels. This just creates a slight overall softness.