Light bloom

[marcchristopher]

In a different thread (http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/pho...fc-luzern.html) DJSoulglo suggested to create a light bloom for a specific image...
So, I played around a bit with a few different techniques and thought I'd post my workflow here... Maybe this can be of value for others with a similar problem. To me, this seems like a simple procedure for creating a realistic light bloom without any guesswork. (I'd also be interested in all improvements you can think of)

• First of all, have the background and the foreground object (for which we will create the light bloom) on two separate layers. Save the layer mask for the foreground object to a new channel (this will make a subsequent step easier).
• Duplicate the background layer, call it "bloom" and put it on top. Apply some gaussian blur to taste.
• Add a curves layer (applied only to the "bloom" layer), shift the black point to the right a bit (increasing the shadow part) and lift the middle values (gamma) to brighten the whole thing.
• Set the "bloom" layer to "screen".
• Load the foreground mask as selection.
• Apply "Border" to the selection (Select > Modify > Border), choose a suitable radius (this affects the size of the bloom and depends on the image).
• Blur the selection a bit.
• Intersect the selection with the foreground layer mask. This restricts the selection to the interior of the foreground object.
• Set the selection as layer mask for the "bloom" layer.

That's it.
Thoughts?