Create A Dreamy Effect For Your Pictures

First, you want to open the picture that you wish to edit. Resize it to whatever size you want it to be. In this case, I have chosen a cute picture of my bf and my puppy, Smokey sleeping/falling asleep; resized it to 500×375px.

Next, create a duplicate layer of the picture by holding the ctrl key and the “j” key. You may rename it to whatever you want at this point but as you can see, I have left it as “Layer 1 copy”.

As per the picture above, change the settings to “overlay” from “normal”.

Your picture should now look like this.

Then, go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur.

Choose a radius of 4.0pixels. Your picture should start to look great already (as u can see in the background of the above picture).

Now, create a duplicate of the “Layer 1 copy”. When you do this, you will see that the “original picture” has now changed to “background” and the “layer 1 copy” has now changed to “layer 1″ and the latest duplicate will be called “layer 1 copy”. I hope this doesn’t confuse anyone. It’s pretty much common sense. This time change the settings of the latest duplicate to “screen”.

Oh no! The picture is now too bright.

No worries, fix this by changing the opacity to 50%.

Now your picture is perfect. You can stop here if you want.

For a more polished look, select the “background” layer, choose the blur tool and run it through your subject’s face.

For better precision, enlarge the picture and toggle the size of the brush.

This is how your final product should look like. Nice and dreamy looking right? You can stop here if you want.

However, I decided to go a step further and fade the edges of my picture for an even more dreamy effect. Choose the “brush” feature and choose a soft brush as you can see in the picture above.

I used white as the brush color but you can feel free to use any other color that you want. Run the brush carefully all along the corners of your picture. Your picture should then look liek this.

This is MY final product. I added the words “sweet dreams” and some hearts.

 That is the end of my tutorial. I hope you enjoyed that and have found it useful. Have fun photoshop-ing!!!