Not all of us have access to an off camera flash in order to create some dramatic lighting effects in our images, but luckily for those of us who want to try out special lighting on our photos Photoshop comes to the rescue and we are able to carefully manipulate and place a lighting source of our preference and it just so happens that this can be done really easily and in a matter of minutes!

12

Open your image in Photoshop. You will notice that the image I have chosen of my cat sleeping in a handbag was already taken with an external flash and some lighting effects have already been created.

But this doesn’t mean that you can’t enhance that lighting with further tweaks.

21

At the top of the page select Filter – Render – Lighting Effects.

A control pops up that looks like this….

31

The control panel is pretty straight forward even though it might look daunting in the beginning. At the top you are able to select what style of lighting you want by clicking on the little drop down arrow and selecting from the list available.

(one spot light? A couple of spotlights? A torch type light? A colourful light?)

Then you are able to select how you want that light to effect your image – do you want it to shine from a direction across the whole image (directional) or shoot directly onto one target area of your photo (Omni) or do you want it to shoot from a directional onto a portion of your image (spotlight)

Also - clicking on the light in the “preview” picture lets you make further adjustments - you can swing the light around to face another direction or you can expand or shrink it and even move it to a new location on the image. (click on the little adjustment points around the ring of the light, the little dots and tiny squares)

Once you have chosen from the two dropdown menus the style and type of light that best suites your image, you can now make custom adjustments to that light. You can change how bright you want it, how intense the lighting should be. You can select if you want the light to be shiny or matt (bringing gloss to your image or not) and you can also select what the overall ambience of your image should be (a dark and broody image of a well lit happy image.)

It’s as easy as that!

Here are some examples of lighting effects you could use.

(The Lens Flare can be found at Filter – Render – Lens Flare)

lighting