Digital Home Thoughts: The Orton Effect - Digital Photography Tip of the Week

"Image editing programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop Elements, Gimp and Microsoft Digital Image Suite offer a wide range of tools that can be used to create beautiful photographs, many of those tools and the effects they crete originated in the world of film photography. One such tool effect is the Orton Effect. The Orton Effect is named after Michael Orton who first used the technique is a sandwich of two images, one in focus the other out of focus. Freeman Patterson and Andre Gallant have both used the technique successfully in their work as well. The Orton image has traditionally been done using slide film with the first, sharp, image overexposed by two stops and the second, out of focus image, over exposed by one stop. It is important to use a tripod for this type of work to ensure your photographic elements remain in register on the film. The shots were then sandwiched together in single slide mount to produce a beautiful, impressionistic image. We are beyond that now and with so many things in the world of digital photography, we can now duplicate the same effect in multiple ways."



Very nice. I had no idea about this effect but have always like these pictures. Now I can make them myself. Of course, I was expecting the article to teach me how to do this with two separate images (for which I would have then asked - how do I get the images to be exactly similar, especially without a tripod) but this technique necessitates the tripod and can be done with only one image. Good stuff, try it out.