Ortonisation of digital images

I won't go into the details of the Orton effect - except to say it produces a light, colour saturated, image with soft details akin to an impressionist painting. For more detailed description see Wikipedia or this blog for working with JPEGS.

My method starts with the raw file - which allows you to go back to the original exposure method a produce a sandwich of two "slides". Prepare two exposures at one and two stops above your average (neutral) exposure point. Save these in your preferred format, I use TIFF because of the information lost in compression makes large prints difficult.

Sharpen the "slide" overexposed by 2 stops, and add Gaussian blur (the amount depends on the final effect you want) to the "slide" overexposed by one stop. This second slide has now become the poor man's equivalent of the out of focus slide. Although technically not the same and perhaps not benefiting from bokeh caused by the lens arrangement, for most purposes the result is the same and better than a 3 layer sandwich used for JPEGS.

Now comes the time to combine our two slides and create an image with the softness and colour of an Ortonised image. With physical slides the out of focus slide would be used to screen the in focus slide. So stack your blurred "slide" over the focussed one and select the screen blending mode. You now have your final image which should provide an impressionistic style, which you may want to tweak by adjusting the degree of screening, and the final levels. The beauty of using digital is of course if you feel the image is too overexposed for your tastes you can then go back and repeat the process at lower exposures. Try doing that with a slide film back in the darkroom.