How do I get that hazy / soft focus in portraiture?

How do I get the hazy / soft focus effect I see others purposely use in portraiture? Seems to be more than the lighting. Is there a filter for this or is it just lighting and/or a technique?

I'm shooting with D7000, 85mm f/1.8D.


Thank you in advance for sharing.

Jeffrey

Put some petroleum jelly on your UV Filter...that will give you a dreamy light cast on your highlights. You can play with varying degrees of thickness. Bring some alcohol cleaning wipes with you to clean the filter when your done.

Lots of ways, with slightly different looks softening effects. Easy ones are find a lens that's single coated/uncoated and shoot into the light source and let veiling flare soften the contrast. A stocking (nude (peach), black, or white) trapped between a filter or expansion ring will soften and reduce contrast. As someone else mentioned petroleum jelly on a cheap UV/clear filter will soften in a different way. Some older lens designs are very soft especially wide open (though usually they have lots of coma some have interesting bokeh), there are soft focus lenses that aren't expensive anymore as they're very out of trend these days, and while I suspect it's quite expensive and don't think they're still made, but Zeiss made a softening filter (I want to say it's the Softar).

There were a couple of good mechanical solutions.

I would add in to those, the Lensbaby system.

There is also a wide array of post processing solutions.

Some are free and easy once you know the trick; others will cost you a few dollars for specialized software.

Minolta made a lens with adjustable sharpness/softness just for this purpose
http://www.dyxum.com/dforum/topic11743.html

heh, I just realized canon makes a soft focus lens. are there others?

What is this specialized software you are talking about, drh681?

Could someone post a few photographic examples?

Atina said:

Atina wrote:

What is this specialized software you are talking about, drh681?

Could someone post a few photographic examples?

Click to expand...

A nice easy one is to make a duplicate layer.

desaturate it, and apply the Highpass filter and invert the image;

set the layer merge mode to softlight.

another is to make the same dupe layer and just blur it with gauss blur then paly with the merge modes and opacity setting. or use an eraser tool set to soft edge and low opacity.

I see suggestions about filters and special lenses. Cheapest way I know is using computer software such as Picasa.

I have a Canon 135 mm 2.8 sf lens but I never use it any more. Much more control using software solutions like gausian blur overlay In Photoshop. A true soft focus image is not just a blurred photo but has an overlayed image with the highlight values softened and a sharp image below. I still haven't found a method that does it as well as the 150mm SF lense on a Mamiya RB67 on Vericolor ProS film.

Cheapest way of all is take a deep breath then breath out on the UV/Clear filter (or bare front element). Then quickly frame the shot in the viewfinder and take the shot when the desired level of softness appears. If you miss it breath in and try again. You have much longer to decide during winter than you do in summer