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Make a Radiant Portrait

16.04.2012
No doubt you have heard someone be complimented with the effusive expression, "You are positively radiant!" I love the sentiment, but I've never quite seen it in real life. Who has skin that actually glows? Perhaps I'm being too literal. Nonetheless, regardless what you think of this in real life, you can create a radiant glow in your digital portraits through some clever photo editing trickery. Using a technique similar to the --which works very nicely in still life and landscape photographs--you can add a warm and romantic glow to your portraits. Here's how.

Begin by opening the photo that you want to tweak in your favorite photo editor. For starters, choose a portrait of a single person in which the overall exposure is about right, and the person fills a lot of the frame.

I'm going to use Corel's PaintShop Pro X4 this week, though the steps are straightforward enough that you can very easily apply them to Adobe Photoshop Elements, GIMP, or any program that supports layers.

We want to stack two identical copies of the photo, so make a duplicate layer. In PaintShop Pro, choose Layers, Duplicate, and then click OK. You should see a second layer appear in the Layers palette on the right side of the screen.