Create a soft focus effect using the High Pass filter in Photoshop

Soft Focus using High Pass

In this short article i'm going to show you how to create a soft focus effect using the High Pass filter found in photoshop (under filter > other > high pass).

First we are going to open up the image that we want the effect applied to, Then we'll duplicate the image using command (or control on a pc) + J . Then we are going to invert the new layer using command (or control on a pc) + I

The inverted image and the image after setting the blend mode to soft light

After this set the blend mode of the inverted layer to "soft light" this will make your image look washed out (dont worry this will be fixed in the next step).
Next we are going to apply the high pass filter to the image, I strongly suggest that you experiment with the radius setting, between 10 pixels and 60 pixels are useally good starting points.

The high pass filter and the image after the filter was applied

I found that 30 pixels gave me the "soft focus" look that i was after, you could stop here but i found that this image needed a little bit of sharpness back in the center. To do so i'm going to use a layer mask and mask out the parts that i dont want the effect. To get a layer mask you can go to layer > layer mask > reveal all or you could click on the "washing machine" icon on the bottom of the layer's pallete

The layer mask button on the layers pallete

All that's left to do now is to make sure that the layer mask is selected and then paint out the area's of our picture that we dont want the effect applied to with black.

The painted layer mask looks like this

And here we have our final image: