Today when the darkroom is a lightroom created by electrons and photons stored in a computer core memory instead the Orton effect can easily be simulated by using software. This tutorial will show you how to create the Orton effect using a single picture. You can of course still shoot an out-of-focus picture just in the original version of the Orton Slide Sandwich but there is no real need for it since software today can create lens blurr that you can have even more control over.

This tutorial is based on GIMP version 2.6 and I used it in MS Windows XP service pack 3.

Photographs suiteable for this effect are macros of flowers, landscapes and so on. You should select a photograph that have contrasts and rich tones, they seem to work best with the Orton effect.

1. Open the photograph in GIMP and go to the layers window pane where you will find one layer called “Background” presently. This is the picture you have chose.
2. Start by lighten the picture about 1 EV (one f-stop) this can be done from the menu by selecting brightness and contrast and then moving the brightness slider upp substantially. Exactly how much you need to experiment.
3. Duplicate the background layer by right clicking on it and select duplicate.
4. Select the new layer and change the mode to multiply. You will now see a picture with a rather harsh contrast. If it is too harsh you need to go back to step 2 and lighten the starting picture even more.
5. Select the top layer, your background copy because the next step is only applied to this layer.
6. Find in the menu Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur
7. Adjust the filter setting to something around 30 points works well for me. This depends a bit on how large your photograph is. Experiment. If your first attemt is not okay use the undo function and apply a different value and try again.
8. When you are satisfied, flatten the layers from the layers menu.
9. Adjust levels, curves and saturation to your liking.
10. Save the photograph under a new name.

That was not too difficult was it? Here below is a step by step how the picture will look after each step in the tutorial above.

After step 3

After step 6 the picture looks like this.

When finished adjusting the final picture looks like this

I should add that the orton effect created here is a bit exaggerated with more blurring than necessary just to show the principle. In reality you would probably want to apply a little less blur than what I used here. But it is of course all up to you

Anders Pettersson

Orton imagery, also called an Orton slide sandwich, is a photography technique which blends two completely different photos of the same scene, resulting in a distinctive mix of high and low detail areas within the same photo.^[1] It was originated by photographer Michael Orton.

It is time to get creative with Photoshop, or perhaps just using your cameras double exposure feature if you have it (the D300 does). Working with Photoshop or GIMP has the added benefit that you can take any photo, apply lens blurr and work on it even if you never did an out of focus exposure when you took it…

These are the steps in creating an Orton Effect:

1. Select a nice scene and take a photograph that is +1 EV over-exposed.
2. Defocus so that the scene is out of focus by switching to manual focus and blurring the picture slightly. This should also be +1 EV over-exposed.
3. When you are home in photoshop or the photo editing software of your choice add the two images together in two different layers. Change the blending from “Normal” to “Multiply”.
4. (Play around)

Of course you can stard with any photo you already have and make two lightened copies of it and then blurr one of them and blend them together. This is also acceptable.

Here are examples of the orton effect on Flickr.

Below are links to other sites that explains how to attain this effect both with film and digital cameras:

• Here is a howto from Creative Nature Photography
• Photoshop tutorial from Photography Corner
• One for GIMP. If you do not have GIMP you can download it for free here.

Good luck!

(Post your contributions in the comments section with links to your photographs)