Introduction: Creating a Diffuse Glow

In Photography Diffusion is refered to as the softening of detail on a photgraph achieved by the scattering of light applied to the subject. A diffuse glow is basically a glow that takes the light parts of the image and scatters the light being reflected. This gives the image a sort of surreal feel. We will explore a technique for creating this effect using Photoshop.

Open your image.

Go into channels tab and select the green channel.

With the green channel selected, press Ctrl+A and then Ctrl+C to copy the channel.

Select the RGB channel.

Make a new layer Shift+Ctrl+N.

Paste the channel we copied Ctrl+V.

Now go to Filter/Blur/Gaussian Blur and put the Radius to 5.0.

Set the layer mode to Overlay...and Voila!

The result:

In a few easy steps we got our dreamy looking photo. Cheers, and keep experimenting with Photoshop.