How to make a quick photo effect in PhotoShop?

I know some of you are tired of having the same boring photo on myspace or facebook so this is a quick way to spice up those photos. Well let’s start by opening a new file by going to file, open, and select an image that you want to mess around with for this tutorial. I selected the toucan image that came with my Vista Home Premium sample photos shown below.

1. Go to Layer, Duplicate Layer, and rename it to what ever you want and then hit ok.
2. With the new layer selected go to filter, blur, Gaussian blur, and we want a radius of about 4.0 pixels.
3. If you don’t have your layers panel open go to window and select layers.
4. Finally with the layers panel open on the Gaussian blurred layer change the layer style from normal to hardlight.

These are what your steps should look like to a certain extent depending on the image and the size of the images.