Hello everybody! Yanik here for Yanik’s Photo School and today we’re going to look at those small little video quickie on how to add a mood to photos that represent love and romance. It could be family bonding and just to give it that nice soft fuzzy feeling to it and we’re going to be doing that by using a filter that’s already in the Photoshop called Gaussian blur.

Now, here’s a photo of a family, a father and his son and I thought it would be pretty appropriate for this type of photo because of the emotions that are in this image to add a little Gaussian blur to this image and add an extra bit of mood and fuzziness to it.

So, first thing we need to do is duplicate our layer and let me bring the layers palette up here so you guys can see and you do that by hitting Control J, Command J on the MAC and we’ve duplicated our layer. Now, this is very important because we’re going to be reducing the opacity of this layer and we’ll be also working on the bottom layer and Adobe as well.

Now, we’re going to go into our filters which is up here, filter, blur and Gaussian blur. Now, if you look at this image as is, you’re going to say, “Well, Yanik we can't really do much with that at blur. We don’t see any detail whatsoever,” and you’re absolutely right. And you might be tempted just to reduce the radius and say, oh there you go I can start seeing some details, but actually it looks out of focus more than anything else and again, you’ll be absolutely right and that’s what we’re going to do is actually bring our radius up to around 20 pixels or so. We’re going to click okay. And now the whole trick here to creating the mood is to reduce the opacity of the top layer and we do that by going up here making sure our top layer is selected, going into opacity and then reducing it.

Let’s start off with 40%, see what it looks like. Let’s look at it before and after. It’s looking pretty good. Nice, soft but we still see the detail underneath. Now, if I zoom at a 100%, we see before and after. It has really nice feeling to it. You still see all the details in the skin, so you we might leave it as and say great we’ve got our Gaussian blur, we got the mood we wanted to create. Let’s save this image. But some of you might actually want to bring out a little bit more detail in the features on the images, but by still retaining the same amount of blur and all you need to do is select your bottom layer, go into filter and this time we’re going to go into sharpen and you can either use smart sharpener or unsharp matte, I prefer smart sharpen.

Now of course you’re going to see the results here in the preview pane of that layer only. You’re not actually seeing the two layer, so you’re not actually seeing it through the Gaussian blur. So, what you need to do is move that out of the way a little bit and see the effects before and after by unclicking the preview button to see if your radius and the amount is to your liking and I like it at around this radius of one, amount close to 100%. If I look before and after, it adds just a little 350 in the sharpness, but still retaining that nice soft Gaussian blur on the top layer. Click okay on that, let it work a little bit.

Now, let’s look at a before, you see how the bottom layer here is over sharpened but when we add the top layer of the Gaussian blur, it actually looks quite normal in terms of sharpening. It looks pretty sharp but at the same time nice and smooth and moody.

Now, let’s look at the full picture and if we look at the original image and to what we brought at that, it’s looking pretty good. And there you have it, a little video quickie on how to create mood in pictures that represent love and romance. This is Yanik Chauvin signing out for Yanik Photo School and talk to you soon.