Tip #3069 - Light Up Your Photos
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Light
Up Your Photos
Have you ever taken
pictures of big, pretty monuments, but they ended up being not so captivating?
It happens to me all the time. Especially when I click pictures from the
inside. You know, close to a window or something. Confused? Well, basically,
I recently discovered a little trick that has been so helpful to me and
I am going to share it with you nice folks today!
I am going to do
a little “light on a famous monument” tutorial. For this,
I am going to use the picture seen below.
At the end of the
tutorial, you should be able to create a "divine light" effect
coming from that once boring window. Let’s get started with step
1.
Open your image on
a new layer in a new Photoshop document. Go to Select,
Color Range. Now, we are going to separate the grain
from the chaff. In the color range window that pops up, make sure to select
Highlights and ensure that the Selection radio
button is selected, as you can see in the screenshot given below. This
should create a scary movie effect, but just go with it for now.
Now, we need to create
a new layer using what has been copied after the color range action. Go
to Layer, New, Layer Via Copy
or you can press Ctrl + J to create a new layer. Press
Ctrl + J once again to duplicate this new layer. With
the top layer selected, do a quick radial blur. To do that, go to Filter,
Blur, Radial Blur.
In the radial blur
box, change the amount to 100, the Blur Method to zoom and the Quality
to best. This part is very critical, as you need to position the radial
blur according to the position of the light. If your source of light is
on the left, you'll place the radial blur on the left and vice versa.
In the picture I am using, the source of light (the window) is pretty
much in the middle, which is where I have left my radial blur focal point,
as you can see in the screenshot below.
Now you will begin
to see early signs of the desired effect. Apply this radial blur effect
as many times as you think is necessary to make it look like you want.
Remember, you don’t want too much of the divine light effect, because
it will drown out the rest of the image. On the other hand, you don't
want to end up having not enough of the effect, because then it will be
overshadowed by its surroundings. So, repeat this step according to taste
and find your happy medium. To repeat the above step, either follow the
procedure as we did earlier or simply press Ctrl + F
as many as times as you want to repeat the effect.
Another way to magnify
the lighting effect is to duplicate this radial blurred layer as many
times as it takes to achieve the desired divine effect. Again, to duplicate
the layers, hit Ctrl + J. After you are done with the
above two steps, merge all the "light effect" layers together
by pressing Ctrl + E. Remember to merge only the layers
that have the light effect on them and not the layers with the original
image.
With the top layer
selected, run a little bit of a Gaussian blur on this image, just so the
light scatters around a little bit more. Go to Filter,
Blur, Gaussian Blur to run this effect
and select a radius of around one.
Chances are that after
this step, your image will be looking a little bit over blurred. Well,
don’t worry, I am not going to ask you to go and undo a few of the
steps you did. In fact, excess effect is better than a lack in the effect.
Now, to take some of the blur away on some parts of the image, we are
going to use the brush tool (press E to quickly activate
the brush). The points to be remembered here are that one, always use
a soft brush and two, change the opacity of the brush to around 20 to
30, so that the un-blurring doesn’t seem too obvious.
For example, the image
I am working on here is over blurred, especially when it comes to the
window, so I am going to un-blur the window a bit. To do this, I have
decided to select a big soft brush that covers the window in its entirety
and just click once with it to subtly un-blur the effect. The settings
I used are given below.
As you will see, the
paintbrush acts like an eraser and by using this, you are simply "erasing"
the blurring light effect, but very subtly. After this step, your light
rays should be coming out very nicely. We are officially done with the
light ray effect. Now, the only thing missing is the tone of the image.
It’s a bit shabby still, isn’t it? To fix it, we are going
to use levels. First, select the layer on which the original image resides.
Then go to Image, Adjustments, Levels
or press Ctrl + L to open the levels box.
When it comes to this
image, I have worked to make it a bit darker at the back and make the
front (the door) a bit more shiny. In plain simple language, I brought
the right most slider toward the left and the left most toward the right.
Just play around with it until your image starts to look good. It’s
as simple as that. The settings I used for mine might not work for your
picture, so it’s super important that you twirl the slider around.
Given below is the image I ended up with.
It doesn’t take
a Picasso to notice the difference between the before and after images,
right? Go ahead give it a spin!
~ Yogesh Bakshi
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