SHEF'ing

You may not have heard this term before, but no doubt you’ve seen it–SHEF’ing. I have no clue what it stands for (if anything), but it’s a special technique that makes an image look “bloomed”; that is, glowing.

1) Select and open an image of your choice. In this case, I opened a picture of my Indiana Jones minifig.

Click to enlarge

2) Duplicate the background layer (the one with your image) twice.

3) On the “Background” layer, go to Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast…

Set the brightness at 20, and press Ok.

4) On the second layer, “Background copy 2″, press CTRL + L to get to the levels window.
Make the middle number 0.10 or drag the middle slider all the way to the right. Your levels window should look like this now:

Press Ok.

5) On the same layer, go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur…

Set the radius to 9 and press Ok.

6) On the layers window, set the second layer (”Background copy 2″), to Screen.

7) Select the top-most layer, “Background copy”, and apply a Gaussian blur of 3 pixels.

8) On the same layer, press SHIFT + CTRL + U to desaturate it. It should now look a bit like this:

Click to enlarge

9) Set this layer to Overlay…

10) …And you’re done! Here’s how mine turned out.

Click to enlarge

Happy SHEF’ing!
Note: This also works on filmstrips!!