From the course: Photoshop 2020 Essential Training: Photography

Adding lens flare - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2020 Essential Training: Photography

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Adding lens flare

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- [Narrator] It's easy to add special effects such as a lens flare to an image in Photoshop. Now we could convert this layer to a smart object and then apply the effect, but for added flexibility, I'm going to add the lens flare to a separate layer. But before I do that, I want to set it up. So I'm just going to choose Filter, and then Render, and then Lens Flare. There are four different types of lens flares, and I'm going to turn up the brightness here, just to make sure we can see that not only is it adding that flare, but it's also adding these circular ghost areas to the image. So as I move that around, I can reposition them. There's these different lens types, so I can switch to the 35 millimeter, 105, or the movie prime, and I get different effects. I'm going to return to the 50 to 300, and then just bring down the amount, or the brightness of the lens flare. I like the brightness up here, this isn't quite enough, but that's okay 'cause I'm just going to duplicate it in a moment. But what I'm doing now is I'm just positioning it, I'm getting the position correctly, so that when I place this on its own layer, I don't have to guess at where it should be. I'll click Okay, that will apply it, and then I'll just use Command + Z in order to undo that. Now, at the bottom of the Layers panel, I'm going to hold down the Option key on the Mac, or the Alt key on Windows, and click on the New Layer icon. That brings up the New Layer dialogue. We'll call this lens flare. And I'm going to change the mode here to overlay. When you have the overlay blend mode, you can fill the layer with 50% gray, and that will disappear, and I need to do that because I need content on the layer, I need actual pixels there for Photoshop to run the filter. So I'll click Okay. We can't see the contents because it's set to overlay, but see if I set it back to normal, we can see that it did fill with 50% gray. Okay, now if I want to do this in a flexible manner, then I'm going to first convert this layer for smart filters. That turns it into a smart object, then I can choose filter, and we can just run the lens flare filter again by selecting it from the top of the menu. I'll click Okay, and we can see that now I have that lens flare. But the reason that I add it as a smart filter is because I think the edges of these ghost areas down here, they're a little bit too harsh. So I'm going to return to the filter menu, choose blur, and add a Gaussian Blur. That's way too much, so let's bring that down, maybe around three or four pixels, and click Okay. Now we can toggle on and off the blur, you can see it's just slightly softening this area down here. But I want to make it stronger, so I'm going to use Command + J in order to duplicate that layer. So now I can see the circular ghost areas, but this area's too bright, not a problem because we can just add a layer mask at the bottom of the Layers panel, tab the B key to select the brush tool, use Option + Ctrl to get a larger brush, and tap the X key so that I'm painting with black, and I'll just paint with black in the top of this layer, so that it hides the lens flare at the top, and now all I get is the extra strength for these different ghost areas. So there you go. The next time you're looking for a bit of control when you're adding your lens flares to images, be sure to convert them to a smart object first, and put them on their own layer.

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