From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: Photography

Adding lens flare - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: Photography

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Adding lens flare

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- [Instructor] It's easy to add a special effect such as a lens flare to an image in Photoshop. Now I could begin by converting the background into a smart object and then apply the effect. But for added flexibility, I'm going to add it to a separate layer. Now, in order to set up the position of the lens flare, I'm going to apply it to the background and then undo it. But that's going to come in handy when I add that second layer. So under the filter menu, I'll choose render and then lens flare. We have a number of different lens types that I can choose from, including a movie prime, but for now I'm going to leave it set to the first one, and let's increase the brightness so we can see it in the preview area. There's a little cross up here that I can click and drag on in order to change the position of the lens flare. In this case I want it to appear from the upper right hand corner, but this is a little too great, so I'm going to decrease the brightness value. When I click okay, Photoshop is going to apply that lens flare to the background. But I'm actually going to undo that using edit and then undo lens flare. Then I'm going to add a new layer on the layers panel, but I'll hold down the option key on Mac or the alt key on Windows before clicking on the plus icon. That's going to display the new layer dialog where I can change the blend to overlay. Once I've set the blend mode to overlay, I can then fill with overlay neutral color meaning that Photoshop is going to fill this layer with 50% gray. But because 50% gray doesn't show up in overlay, it's going to appear as if we have an empty layer in the image area, but we can see on the layers panel that it is indeed filled with 50% gray. And that's important because in order to add the lens flare filter, there has to be pixel values on this layer. Now if we want to add some flexibility, I can right click and then convert this layer into a smart object, before I choose the filter menu again, and then select lens flare. Since we've already set it up to be in the correct position, all I need to do is choose it from the top of the list. As you can see, all I can see is this gray background. So if we hadn't set it up, we wouldn't know exactly where to position it in the image area. I'm going to go ahead and just make this a little bit brighter to make sure that we can see it. Click okay. And now we've got our lens flare. The only problem is this little localized area of flare, these circular kind of ghost areas. I want to make them a little bit softer, so I'm going to add a second filter by selecting filter, and then blur, and then Gaussian blur. And I'll just add a small blur of maybe three pixels. All right. I think that looks better. Now I'd like to emphasize this area a little bit more, but not necessarily the brightness in the upper right. In order to do that, I can duplicate this layer by holding down the option key on the Mac or the alt key on Windows, and dragging up in order to make a duplicate. Now that I have a duplicate, we can see these localized areas a little bit more, but the upper right area is too bright. So on the bottom of the layers panel, I'm going to add a layer mask, and then tap the B key to select the paintbrush. I'll paint with 50% opacity, making sure that I'm painting with black in order to hide this layer. And I'll just paint in that upper right area in order to decrease the brightness from this lens flare. Of course I can paint multiple times if needed, in order to continue to darken that down so that all we see are those circular ghost areas in the foreground. So there you go. The next time you're looking for a bit of control when you're adding your lens flares to your images, be sure to set up the filter first, then create a new layer, convert it to a smart object, and apply the filter.

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