Okay I just received a comment for a photo on another site that said this photo was blurry. So I'm asking more people to give me their opinion as to whether these two photos are blurry or soft focus. Especially since I specifically edited to give it a soft focus look.
I see them as soft focus; your commentor probably does not know hte difference. The detail is still there.
FWIW, the SF effect is applied a little heavily, IMO. It becomes a major feature of the photo instead of a gentle enhancement.
Seems quite clear to me that the style and effect you have gone for is soft focus. Having seen the original, it (the original) does seem a little soft but seeing as you were after a soft focus image this isn't an issue.
Were you trying for a soft focus in camera?
I personally only ever apply soft focus in photoshop rather than getting the effect in camera.
The original is none too sharp to begin with. So when you apply the soft focus/glow effect to that, the whole thing looks sort of super-fuzzy and it's not real effect. For the most part, if you want to add soft focus/glow to an image, you need to start with a sharper underlying image. Here's you original version sharpened with focus magic:
The image itself wasn't meant to be that sharp. The one below posted as original edit is after I already softened it a bit to rid of any noise as well as blurring out the background completely (using gaussian blur).
The technique i used to get the effect on the following edit to get the soft focus and enhance the color was:
I duplicated the image, Added a gaussian blur, then increase the brightness really high. Then i copied and pasted the duplicated image back onto the original and blended it with a multiply effect.
Kirbic, it's possible the effect may be over done and i can fix that by simply changing the opacity of the layer before I flatten it.
I was just curious if people could tell that it was soft focus and not blurry.
Well then, what you want to try is to preserve some sharpness in certain key areas, usually the face and the hands. You can do this by selectively erasing those areas in the soft overlays. Generally, really successful soft focus/glow images have underlying areas of decent sharpness.
