Using FOTO with Fireworks MX : Soft Glamour Pro

In this tutorial, you will learn how to harness the power of one of the members of the new command set from Phireworx. Soft Glamour Pro is a powerful command, and is one of five of the members of FOTO.

Soft Glamour Pro replicates the effect of the “Soft focus” filter used by professional photographers to enhance fashion and advertising photo shots. Soft Glamour Pro, instead of degrading an image like a simple focus manipulation will do, upholds a sharp version of the subject adding a soft glowing version of it and enhancing, this way, the overall atmosphere. In addition to this, you can specify optional glow tinting for added effect.

Before launching straight into the tutorial, if you haven’t yet purchased FOTO 1.0, now is an excellent opportunity to do so.

Setting up the Workspace

1 Open an image of your choice in Fireworks MX. It is preferable that the content of the image is either a portrait or other such photograph.
2 Select the Marquee tool from the Bitmap section of the Tools Panel.

Enhancing your photographs

1 From the Commands menu, select Aftershape > Soft Glamour Pro. You should be presented with the interface shown below.Try playing with the interface and watch the preview window to get a feel for what Soft Glamour Pro can do for your image. Those between you who have tried Soft Glamour 2.0 before, which is available as a free download from Phireworx member’s area, knows for sure what a great tool Soft Glamour is when it comes to enhance people portrait and fashion photographs. In addition to the dreamy blurring system of Soft Glamour 2.0, the Pro version introduced the possibility to further boost the final composition adding a base tint to it.NOTE: The preview window only gives an approximate preview of the effect.

Dreamy shot of Annabelle

As stated before the images that will benefit the most of the treatment given by Soft Glamour Pro, are people portraits. The key to a successful glamour shot stands on being able to identify which part of your model’s visage to apply the soft focus effect for the best results.

 

1 Open an image in Fireworks MX.
2 Select the Lasso tool in the Bitmap section of the Tools Panel.
3 Start by selecting one of the eyes.
4 Hold down the SHIFT key on your keyboard and draw additional selection marquees on the other eye, the lips, the eyebrows and part of the nose. Hold down Alt (Win) or Option (Mac) to subtract, if needed, from the selections.

 

5 Choose Select > Select Inverse
6 Soften the edge of the pixel selection. Choose Select > Feather and enter a value between 5 to 10 pixels
7 Select Commands > Aftershape > Soft Glamour Pro

8 Select 3.5 as Glamour FX amount and add to it a slight red hue setting its Tint Opacity to 10, then click the ok button.

Really nice! As you can see Annabelle’s freckles are almost gone and her skin looks definitively softer. In addition to this, when exporting as jpeg an image treated with Soft Glamour Pro, even the resulting weight will be lowered, due to the fact that Soft Glamour Pro, slightly blurring the photograph, augmented the number of redundant information discarded by JPEG’s compression technique.

Conclusion

This tutorial guided you through the features of Soft Glamour Pro, from photo enhancing to file size optimization. As for the FOTO commands, experimentation is the key to harnessing their power.