I am a great admirer of Michael Orton and his pictures are amazingly wonderful and pleasing to look at. Most of them are landscapes with a painting feel. Orton devised a method of producing these photos with a stack of slide films and make a sandwich of it. The idea was to take series of two photographs and merge them together… of course without a software at the time.

He essentially take two photographs -

1. With aperture set anywhere between f/16 to f/22 so that everything is in focus in the landscape.

2. With aperture increased (e.g f/2.8 of f/4) to get a blurry look of the same frame with over-exposed shot.

Then he would merge them together to get the special effect that we call Orton these days.

Now I thought of reproducing this effect with a single JPEG file that I already have. Normally I would take 2 shots in a similar way and sandwich them together in a digital image processor. But I thought of reproducing the same effect with my old photos. Here is what I did -

1. Open in photoshop any image that you want to experiment with.

2. For over-exposing of the shot – Menu > Image > Apply Image and select Screen with 100% opacity in the dialog box.

3. Duplicate the image – Menu > Image > Duplicate

4. With the duplicate copy of the image, apply Gaussian Blur. I usually would prefer anywhere between 10 – 50 depending on the kind of image it is. More the radius setting, more painterly the image would come out.

5. Now press v on your keyboard to select the move tool. Hold down shift key and use the mouse to drag the blurred image to the previous image. Keep the shift key pressed until you release the mouse with the image over the original. If you leave the shift key before mouse is release, the resulting layer would not be aligned correctly.

6. Now you will see two layers in the Layers pallet. The blending mode by default is Normal. Click on the drop down menu and make it Multiply.

7. Press Cmd+E (in Windows Ctrl+E) to flatten the image.

8. Save it to your disk and you have an image with Orton effect ready.

Before -

After Orton effect -

I would usually not prefer doing this but it is a good way to convert images which are not shot for this purpose but if you would still like to have the effect in them. Some people do not prefer digital manipulation but I do not see anything wrong as long as you do it for creative freedom. After all digital photography is not just about an image out of your camera.

Write to me if you like this article.