Lighting Effects in Photoshop

[chroma]

Lighting Effects in Photoshop are carried out by lighting layers which are typically little more than brush strokes on a layer that rests above your target subject in the layer stack. The layer is then blurred and blended in different ways to give the effect of additional lighting in the scene.

The techniques implemented here are used to control visual focus and balance and to add drama, in some cases.

Lighting Layers

• Shaped light
• Rays of light
• Render Clouds

Shaped light

For creative, vignette-like effects, use the Brush tool to create a simple white shape with soft edges on an empty layer. Setting the brushed layer to Overlay causes the painted areas to brighten whatever is beneath them.

Rays of light

This is a refinement of the shaped lighting layer technique, where the painted shape looks like a ray from a light source. This variation gives a solid visual direction to a composition and is effective at helping tell a story or set a mood. You can enhanced the drama and emotional effect of an image by adding the beams of light coming down from the side of the image.

You can create it by first using the Polygon Lasso tool to draw out the light fingers which you can then fill with the color based on the surroundings. From there you can softened the edges and lowered the opacity by a large amount to give the appearance of light beams. You can create beautiful light beams to your images to catch the viewer’s eye to an important subject.

[Glenny]

To create different lighting effects using the render filter to get professional and beautiful effects on photographs.

1 : Open a new file by clicking on File > Open. Create a new layer.

2 : Open a image by clicking on File > Open. And select the image to your new file canvas.

3 : Now to create different lighting effects go to Filter > Render > Lighting Effects.

4 : In the lighting effects, you can choose different lighting syles like - Flood Light, Blue Omni, Soft Spotlight, Flashlight and many more...

[chroma]

Render Clouds

With render clouds filter, you can add some variations to the landscape by filling an entire layer with black and white splotches. You can immediately see the effects once you've found the Blend mode that works best and have reduced the opacity. Blurring this gives a nice mottled look, and you can use a Perspective transform to make it fit the scene of the image.

Once you’ve masked out the parts of your sky that shouldn’t be mottled, you can take a sample from a variegated light source and use that as the basis for your rays. For this example, we took a 1-pixel-wide selection of light coming through the leaves near the top of the scene and stretched it with the Transform tool to simulate the shape of rays we wanted. This approach provides lots of variation and texture for the light, and appears more natural to the scene, since it has a visual anchor.

[Raine]

This is absolutely great !!! the lighting effects are the most impressive features in the entire photoshop. It simply changes the look of the image and makes the image more lively with all its superb features

[atlanttida]

Hi, i am working right now to transform a day time room into a dark night room...i am reading tutorials about lighting and i want to create a new layer and paint with dark colors over the room....i will also create a lamp on.....so everything will be dark except the areas near the lamp.....do you have another idea on how i should do this?