Today I'm going to show you how to add glow to images and portraits. This technique is widely used in fashion industry to enhance the images of models by adding a dreamy glow effect. Let's get started..

1- Open the image in Photoshop and go straight into channels tab and select the Red Channel.

2- Now go to select>all and then edit>copy

3- Now create a new layer and select edit>paste.

4- Change the blending mode from normal to Luminosity.

5- Reduce the opacity to around 20-25%.

6- Now we are going to use a filter, go to filter>blur and select Gaussian Blur.

7- Depending on the image you're using you will have to adjust the radius of blur according to your needs. For our tutorial we will use a little over 14 pixels

8-  Now go to Images>Adjustments>curves and create a S shape curve by moving the pointers.

9- Add a vector mask by clicking the vector mask icon in the layers panel and select a soft brush .

10- Now brush the eyes, lips and some hair to add some detail to the image. Remember to select black as your foreground color before you brush.

11- Here's how our image looks like before and after the effect.

Before:

After:

This is part 1 of our Glow effect tutorial.