Dreamy Effect for Baby Portraits

This photoshop tutorial will show you how to create soft and dreamy effects for baby portraits. Below is the portraits before and after I apply the effects.

Step 1: Open your baby image, and duplicate the background layer (Layer > Duplicate Layer), then apply adjustment curve (Image > Adjustments > Curves) to your new layer.

Step 2: Now duplicate your 'background copy' layer, apply gaussian blur: 5 pixel, and change the layer mode of 'background copy 2' to overlay. Also change the opacity to 50%

Step 3: Duplicate 'background copy 2' layer, and now you have 'background copy 3'. Change the layer mode of the 'background copy 3' to normal and change the opacity to 25%. and you should have something like this:

From here, you can keep your baby's face sharp by applying layer mask to 'background copy 3' and paint it black or you can also desaturate the color by adding hue/saturation adjustment layer or you can play around with channel mixer adjustment layer to get a black and white photograph like below