Soft Focus Photography - Updated Guide

The Magazine For Photographers
3 days ago
3 min read

Soft Focus Photography

Soft focus is when you intentionally reduce sharpness (just a little) to get a gentle, glowing image. It smooths out textures (especially skin), reduces contrast, and gives your photo a kind of, let’s say ‘ethereal’ look. It is often used in portraits, dreamy landscapes, artistic/fine art work, vintage-style shots or even editorial fashion photography

It is not the same as being out of focus. Good soft focus still has structure in it. You can usually tell what you are looking at, it just feels calmer, more organic, and a little bit, well like a dream.

The Different Ways to Create Soft Focus

There are quite a few ways to do it. Let us take a look at some:

1. Shoot Wide Open

Probably the most simple way to introduce softness is to use your lens near its widest aperture.

For this you want to:

Use a fast lens (f/1.2–f/2)
Focus carefully on the main subject
Let depth of field fall off naturally

Wide apertures often introduce, slight optical softness, low in highlights, gentle edge blur etc. → Older lenses (vintage glass) are especially good at this.

2. Use Diffusion Filters

Soft focus filters are designed specifically for this (but you obviously have to reach in your $ pocket a bit).

Some popular options are → Black Pro-Mist, White Pro-Mist, Soft FX filters.

What diffusion filters do:

Bloom highlights, lower micro-contrast, create the look but still keep the photo readable.

3. Put Vaseline on the Camera Lens

This is the classic DIY method. It is cheap, effective, and delivers surprisingly good results when you do it carefully.

So, here is how to do it:

Make sure to always use a clear protective filter on your lens
Apply a very thin layer of Vaseline around the edges only (you can always add more later)
Leave the centre of the filter clean so the subject stays sharp

This naturally diffuses light and creates the soft glowing look while keeping the centre relatively sharp. The more Vaseline you apply, the stronger the effect of course, but subtlety works best in my opinion.