Jeff St John 
ePhotoPros Staff
The OC
Forum Fanatic
Posts:535
 | | 09/23/2008 7:49 PM |
| This week I found an interesting image that I thought I could make much better by adding a cool lighting effect. So the following is what I came up with:
- I first duplicate my background layer with the trusty CTRL J.
- Then I brought up Shadow/Highlight (I've made my own keyboard shortcut for this) and accepted the default settings. This instantly brought out some of the detail in the faces.
- To pump up the blue in the sky I added a gradient adjustment layer with the soft light blend mode and hid the bottom of the adjustment layer with the layer mask that came with it. I then hit CTRL E (Mac: Command E) to merge the two selected layers, the gradient adjustment and the shadow/highlight layer.
- I hit CTRL J once more to duplicate the layer once again and added a gaussian blur of about 10 pixels. I then set the blend mode to screen to further lighten up the figures and set the opacity to about 70 percent. Once again, I merged the two layers (I have a habit of doing that, keeps my layers uncluttered)
- To add some pop back into the figures I duplicated the layer and set the blend mode of the new layer to soft light. I then masked out everything but the top half of the figures with a layer mask. Again with the CTRL E to merge the two selected layers.
- After duplicating this new image layer once again, I added a diffused glow to the duplicated layer (with white as the background color) and lowered the opacity to 60 percent. I "CTRL E'd" the two layers once again.
- After duplicating this new image, I set the blend mode of the duped layer to multiply to darken the entire image. Then, on a layer mask, I painted in the area in the middle with the figures and some of the sky. This highlighted the figures quite nicely, but I merged the two selected layers and repeated the process one more time to add even more drama.
- After merging the two selected layers I added a Solid Color adjustment layer with an orangish (sepia-like) tone and set the blend mode to Color. I then lowered the opacity to 60 percent and on the accompanying layer mask, used a black to transparent gradient to hide the sky. At this point my image had a cool two tone effect with sepia on bottom and blue on top.
- To add in some light rays wich would finish the effect and further highlight the figures in the middle (or slightly off to the left), I added a new blank layer above the solid color adjustment layer, and with the polygonal lasso tool, drew out three triangular "beams" which I filled with white (ALT Backspace for fill with foreground color). With the "beams" in place I applied a motion blur at 37 degree angle with a distance of about 760 pixels. I then polished them up a bit by adding a layer mask and using a black to transparent gradient to hide the ends of the beams.
The finished product has this almost, surreal quality to it with the yellow and the blue which I really liked. But the most important thing about this image, was that I had lots of fun making it (the lighting effect, not the photograph). Until next week...
jefe
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