Soft Portraits
This short tutorial will teach you how to give your portraits a softer feel.
Start by opening the original picture in photoshop. For this tutorial, I will use a picture of my friend ellie, while she was sitting in front of my *beautiful* blue wall.
Duplicate the layer by hitting ctrl+A - ctrl+c - ctr+v. Then go to the menu on top of the screen and select filter - blur - gaussian blur. Put the strenght of the blur radius 5,0 pixels to get the following effect:
As you can see, the colours have become very bright now. Perhaps you like that, but I want to tone them down a bit. Make sure the top layer is selected and hit image - adjustments - desaturate. The top layer is now transformed to black and white, resulting in a more saturated photo.
Isn't she beautiful?! :]