Shine on ruby2sday...

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Shine on ruby2sday...

I will buy you a garden, where your flowers can bloom...

I will buy you a new car all shiny and new...

...Yes, I will.

The Mustang in the photo above has the headlights turned on by using one of the light modes in Photoshop. That one was the lens flare, and I just had the lens portion of the headlight selected when applied. It makes it appear they were on for the photo. Often times you have to add light back into a photo for one reason or another. The second photo uses the Multiply and Soft light layer options to help with the sky and overal lighting. There are always descriptions of the work when you click on the photo. It will take you to flickr where the steps I used are int eh comments.
The next photo below, as well as the first photo in the blog, were completely reworked and the background only had new lighting applied with the Lighting Effects Filter.

Using the Lighting Effects Filter will allow you to recreate many theatrical lighting scenarios. It is a powerful feature that definitely takes time to learn well, but there are many things that can be done simply, and right off the bat. The image below had some symmetrical things fixed, and then I I isolated the lamp portion. I copied this to a new layer, and then relit the background on the layer below with a Radial style light, and centered to the lamp...

That Jade CD design is also done with fairly simple lighting effect. I almost always isolate the subject somehow and the apply lighting differently to the foreground and background. That technique will add more depth to your shot and make it look natural too. Here are a couple screen caps that have more info on the filter:

Those two screen examples use a spotlight, which is a litle more difficult to understand. There will be another blog on just that one light as it invlovles the understanding of planes and ellipses. Start with something simple like the Lamp with the Blue sky.