Photoshop Effects: Ghosting An Image

Step 7: Merge All Of The Layers Onto A New Layer

We're going to merge all three layers onto a new layer at this point, and we can do that with the keyboard shortcut Shift+Ctrl+Alt+E (Win) / Shift+Command+Option+E (Mac), which takes all three layers and merges them onto a brand new layer at the top of the Layers palette. Double-click on the name of the layer and rename it to merged:

Step 8: Apply The "Diffuse Glow" Filter To The Merged Layer

With the new "merged" layer selected, go up to the Filter menu at the top of the screen, select Distort, and then select Diffuse Glow. This brings up Photoshop's Filter Gallery (it doesn't actually say Filter Gallery anywhere at the moment but it's the Filter Gallery) set to the Diffuse Glow filter options. You may have to play around with the three options a little depending on the image you're using, but for my image, I've set Graininess to 3, Glow Amount to 10, and Clear Amount also to 10 as circled below:

Here's my image after applying the "Diffuse Glow" filter: