Digital Post Processing: The Marina Effect

I was playing around with some post-processing ideas today based on a similar concept to the Orton Effect. The original technique was developed for positive film by Michael Orton. This link provides a good deal of information on the Orton Effect, its history with film and how to apply the technique in digital photography.


The second image is the original image I used while working on the effect. I took the photo of a model named Marina in 2001, hence the name for the technique. The first image is the result of this post-processing technique. The first picture links to the larger version of the image, which shows the facial detail much better. I have a side-by-side comparison of the before-and-after images on Fickr.

The Orton Effect creates a loss of detail in the darker areas of the image. I was looking for a way to achieve a similar effect, but without loss of detail in the shadows. I also wanted the finer details in the image to really stand out.

After a couple of hours of working through various ideas, I came up the the basis for the Marina Effect. It achieves an Ortonesque effect while keeping detail in the darker portions of the image and only slightly softens areas of the image I want to remain sharp, like the eyes.

I still have to do some more work on the effect so that it produces exactly what I have envisioned. Since I want to apply this style to a lot of my photography, I don't plan on discussing the post-processing in any detail at this time.

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