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If movies and TV shows are to be believed, dreams often incorporate a certain degree of glowy vibrant colour, clearly differentiating the dream/vision from real life happenings.  Of course, this hardly ever happens in real life (unless you smoke illicit substances are have a very serious eye condition), but we can easily reproduce this effect in Photoshop using a couple of filters and a careful eye for colour.
 

Step 1: Open up a stock image in Photoshop of any size and/or format. The best results for this tutorial usually involve large images with a generally high brightness.  Dark areas tend to end up MUCH darker as a result of adding the vibrancy, and may require additional adjustment later.

Step 2: With the background layer selected in the layers palette, choose Layer > Duplicate Layer from the main menu.  Select the new duplicated layer in the layers palette (it will be the one on top), and run Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur, with a setting of 3px.   The value of the blur should be altered to suit the size of your image.  If, for example, you have a large image, a setting of 3px to 5px will be sufficient, but for smaller pictures you may have to go down to 1px.

Step 3: Now for the complex and fiddly bit.   Select Image > Adjustments > Levels and use the settings on the right.  These values work best for nature pictures and those with few areas of dark colour.  If your result ends up too dark in the preview, you may need to play around with these values a little.  Adjustment of levels is a complex subject, and best left as a seperate tutorial.

Step 4: With the top layer still active, go to the layers palette and set the blending mode to Overlay.   And that's it - you can now admire your vibrant and dreamy image! Note:   If at this stage your image is exhibiting areas of overly bright or dark color, you should ideally go back to step 3 and adjust the levels until the result is more to your liking. Simply altering the brightness of the image via Image > Adjustments > Brightness /Contrast usually undoes the vibrant effect and can leave things looking washed out.

- Tutorial written by Man1c M0g

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