Orton imagery, also called an Orton slide sandwich, is a photography technique which blends two completely different photos of the same scene, resulting in a distinctive mix of high and low detail areas within the same photo. It was originated by photographer Michael Orton. - Wiki
Here's a quick tutorial that would enable you to achieve that effect in less than 2 minutes... well, you can do it in less than 1 minute if you're quick to the draw.
The following steps summarize the entire tutorial:
1. Open an image in Photoshop.
2. Duplicate the background layer; change its blending mode to screen.
3. Duplicate the background layer again; change its blending mode to multiply; apply Gaussian blur.
4. Sharpen the image.
Yup, it's that simple, really.
By the way, I'm assuming that you already know your way around Photoshop before trying this one out. I will not show you how to duplicate layers, how to set the blending modes, how flatten the image, nor how to sharpen the image.
To get a better handle on things, let's get on with it.
Step 1: Fire up Photoshop and open an image.
Step 2: Duplicate the Background layer. Name the duplicate layer "Screen layer." Set the Screen layer's blending mode to "Screen."
Step 3: Duplicate the Background layer (again). Name this new layer "Multiply layer." Set the Multiply layer's blending mode to, yes, "Multiply." Put this layer on top of the Screen layer.
Your layers window should now look very similar to this:
Step 4: Apply Gaussian blur to the Multiply layer. The radius of your blur can range from 8 pixels to 24 pixels. Experiment with the radius setting until you get that "dreamy" look in your image. I used a radius of 8 pixels for this one.
Step 5: Flatten the image. Apply a bit of sharpening to bring out the details in the edges of the flower. I think I sharpened this one up to 30%.
Step 6: This step is optional. Since setting the blending mode of a layer to "Multiply" increases the saturation of the colors considerably, you might want to tone down the image's saturation a bit. I de-saturated this to around -20.
Orton imagery is primarily a great processing technique for landscapes and foliage in general. However, there are some images wherein using Orton would simply make the image worse. I've seen some people go Orton-crazy and post-process their images just for the sake of using this technique on photos. Not good. Orton imagery is not for every photo. Personally, I've tried this method on hundreds of my photos and only a select few get to be posted on my Flickr account.
Parting shot:
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