A simple photo effect

For us, as we only have photos of our little angel after his had gone to heaven, we find the colour photos sometimes hard to look at as they bring back a lot of the emotions from when we first met him. It is easy enough to get photos printed in black and white, but here is a fairly simple technique that can give photos a dreamy look.

To achieve this effect you can use most photo editing software as long as it has support for multiple layers. The instructions below are for Paint.NET, which is a really good and free photo editing tool.

To show the steps needed to create the effect I’m going to use the following lovely photo of a teddy bear from Annie Mole on Flickr.

First step is to open the photo in the editor (making sure you have made a backup copy of the file) and change the photo to black and white. For Paint.NET, from the menu choose Adjustments -> Black and White. Alternatively you can use the Sepia effect.

The next step is to add a layer that we can draw on without effecting the underlying photo. From the menu select Layers -> Add New Layer.

Now draw a white oval shape on to the new layer. First, select white from the colour picker:

Then select the oval drawing tool from the toolbox, select the “Draw Shape Outline” option and pick a fairly large brush width (for this example I picked 40):

Draw an oval so that it surrounds the middle of the picture. You may have to try it a couple of times (just use undo, ctrl-z, until you get the layout you want):

Next we want to fill in the four corners in white. Pick the fill tool and select a fairly high tolerance so it fills the whole area (without filling the entire picture):

You should now have a picture that looks a bit like this:

Now we want to apply a blur effect to the oval. From the menu select Effects -> Blurs -> Gaussian Blur:

Select a blur radius that works for you:

Finally flatten down the layer into the base photo so you can save the photo using Layers -> Merge Layer Down:

The final photo should look a little like this:

You can put the finished result on a memory stick or CD and take it to be printed.

Whilst this was a fairly practical guide, hopefully it is a straight-forward way of creating special photos.