Today’s tutorial will show how to make that golden hour hazy light effect on your amazing images taken during the daytime.  It’s a fantastic way of making your photos more interesting with the added hazy effect. You can apply this for images that you took during the day where you feel like that it is not making so much of an impact.

Video: Add that hazy light effect!

Here’s a summary of the steps:

(View the video for full details and explanations)

1. Load your image in Photoshop probably a daytime photo.
2. Add a new layer and then grab the brush tool
3. Click on the color picker, in this sample I choose a nice warm yellow light colour.
4. Click on Ok.
5. Go for a really large brush.
6. Change the Opacity level to 30.
7. Draw one big brush stroke to the portion of the image, preferably where the light is shining from on your image.
8. Reduce the opacity to blend the sort of blend the image a little bit.
9. Accentuate the light where the source of the sun is coming from by darkening the other side of the image.
10. To do this add a curves adjustment later, from there you can pull the curve down from the properties window to darken the image.
11. And move the control point up a little bit to remove some contrast in the darkest shadows of the image.
12. Invert the layer mask by pressing Command (Mac) or Ctrl+I (Windows).
13. This hide the effect which we created.
14. Use a white brush to the layer mask to reveal the curves layer.
15. You can go back and tweak the layer mask until the desired look on the image is achieved.
16. At this stage, you can add a Orton effect layer to the image.
17. To this by going to the Select, click All.
18. Go to Edit,click Copy Merge.
19. Go to Edit, click Paste.
20. Go to Filter, click Blur, click Gaussian Blur filter.
21. Set the radius to 15 pixels.
22. Set the layer to Soft Light blend mode.
23. Zoom out to help picture what it would looks like.
24. Since I find that the image is a bit strong I reduced the opacity level.
25. Add one more layer and go back to that light yellow colored brush.
26. Brush to the right side of the image again
27. Change the blend mode of this layer to either soft layer or overlay, just check which one is best for you.
28. Then reduce the opacity level to blend it in a little more.

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