My post processing abilities are a bit limited. My camera doesn't intimidate me, but Photoshop does. I am, however, comfortable with Picasa to do a little post processing on my pictures. Recently I found a flickr site that explains how you can create a kind of Orton effect in Picasa. It doesn't get the kind of results you can get in Photoshop, but it is kind of interesting.
http://flickr.com/groups/picasa/disc...7594492864326/
This is my attempt. Not too great, but fun to try. Sorry about the 4 images.
Original image:
After using fill light to very light and sharpened:
After using shadow to darken and extreme soft focus:
Collage multi-image gives this result:
