Vint Falken posted one awesome Photoshop tutorial again. I didn’t think of that technique she exhibits so well in that post. It’s things like that makes her my uber heroin.

Her article is a tutorial on using Diffuse Glow in a very interesting way, while of course she warns and waggles her finger about said Diffuse Glow over-abuse by some members of the SL artistic community.

I can almost feel her finger waggling at me. I plead guilty as charge to massive Diffuse Glow abuse. No need to point at me, it’s no secret I use it pretty much everywhere. But my own humble opinion is, it’s not so much abused than just generally badly used.

Thing is, I always use it in a different way, and very rarely as is. I work it until it gives me what I want, mixing many different techniques, experimenting new things and always trying to incorporate new tricks in my general workflow.

Sure, what follows will be far from being as elaborate as what Vint did. I’m surely not going to do such an awesome presentation and go in deep details. I won’t post screenshots either. But I would like to contribute to the fun with a very tiny mini HOWTO of how I personally work with it, in hope it could be helpful to some people (not Vint, she’s way over those beginner techniques).

Why do I use Diffuse Glow almost everytime?

1. The primary main reason is that I find the Liquify tool, Heal tool, and the Diffuse Glow filter to be the ideal combo for fixing the nasties, namely nurb lines, distortions and pointy angles. If i’m just looking for a clean sober look, I personally think adding a tiny weenie bit of Diffuse Glow after having cleaned the pic with Liquify and Heal just softens the rougher pixels and gives a sweet look. I sometimes add a tiny bit of Gaussian instead of the glow, if it’s really not indicated. But usually the Diffuse Glow layer has some degree of transparency to adjust it to a more discreet level too.
2. Combined with many many Photoshop basic tools contained in the Image and Layer menus, especially things like the Levels, Color Balance, Desaturate, Saturation/Colorize, etc…, you can create a plethora of base effects. I almost always do a Level on a layer that will have some Diffuse Glow on it, to control the spread of the glowy surfaces.
3. And of course those base layers can be combined in different ways with the Layer transparency and effects, like Overlay, Hard Light, etc… Combined and mixed properly, usually with a bit of intuition and a few trial and errors, this pretty much allows an almost infinite range of effects to create from scratch.

The 3 techniques are very mixable, often my PSD files ends up like uber sandwiches of 5 or more layers with different effects and alpha levels. And it’s really fun to try different things and play with the layers until you get the desired effect.

So, apart Liquify if we can call that a filter, Diffuse Glow would be almost the only Photoshop filter I use. I don’t use any third party plugins, and almost always use Photoshop’s most basic image treatment tools.

For the fun of it, I will try and make a short quicklist describing how I usually proceed for a regular post-processed picture. This assuming you followed the usual advice, used antialiasing, and did a decently high resolution shot. Go for 1600 x 1200 and more. I usually shoot 6000 x 4000 but I’m nuts. I use Photoshop CS2.

So, here goes nothing:

• Open the BMP pic in Photoshop (duh! ;).
• Select Background layer in Layers
• CTRL-J, and CTRL-J (duplicates BG layer, twice)
• Get rid of the Background layer
• Select the top layer (Layer 2)
• Do a Filters / Liquify. Clean the rough angles.
• Do a Tool / Heal. Plaster the nasty pose distortions.
• CTRL-J (always keep a layer copy between each step - Layer 3)
• CTRL-L (Levels, have fun! ^^)
• CTRL-J (yep. backup! - Layer 4)
• Filters / Diffuse Glow (play! but try to moderate and put some Clearing in there)
• Play with this layer’s effects in the Layers window (time to be extreme. Color Dodge, Hard Light…)
• Often, I will CTRL-J (yes, again. Layer 5)
• Play with this layer’s effects too (think lighter. Lighting, Overlay, Screen…)
• Then, hide all but Layer 2, Layer 4 and Layer 5 (or get more if you want, you can stack those babies)
• Keep the background (Layer 2) with no alpha transparency (again Layers window)
• Play with the alpha of the 2 overlaying layers. (Alpha will let you balance your effects)

Voila! That’s not very long or complicated, apart the Liquify and Heal part, those can be long to work if your a crazy perfectionist. But for the rest, it’s a matter of minutes sometimes, or a few more if you want to elaborate more complex or special layer combos.

Before applying the Level and Glow, you can Desaturate the picture. Colorize it with Saturation tool. Whatever, go nuts! It’s fun to try different ideas until you get the result. Often the inspiration comes while working it, as I said, trial and error. Each pic is different, the lighting, general color density, often it takes different treatment for different occasions.

To play with lighting, Levels is often the tool of choice to get a range of effects and control how the Diffuse Glow will be applied on the layer. Note that the top layer (Layer 5) is an extra Diffuse Glow, but depending on which Layer effect you combine with the background picture, the glow MAY or MAY NOT look like normal Diffuse Glow, but instead will be integrated in the lightings and highlights in a more discreet way. In my example, of course Layer 5 can be made optional. Just find a good layer effect for Layer 4 in that case.

Okay, enough for now. I hope this pile of nothing will give a little help to someone that’s getting started or is interested of doing do. Enjoy!

*waves to Vint!*