What do with an old balloon you got for Valentine’s Day? Today I’m going to show you some awesome
effects with lighting. Hey guys, welcome to Phlearn. My name is Aaron
Nace. You can find me on Twitter @aknacer. Today we’re doing some really exciting things
in Photoshop. I want to show you guys how to take some really cool images with a lighting
effect and actually create a halo and some really cool things based on an image that
you guys provided us in a contest. I can’t wait to get into it and today’s going to
be an awesome episode. Let’s go ahead and get started.
Let’s get started guys. This is our image. It was submitted by EJ for a contest and EJ
you won a Phlearn PRO because we’re editing your image here on Phlearn. This is what we’re
going to be today, a very cool lighting effect making this person into a queen of the forest
and not only are we creating like a crown of light and a glow around it but we’re
doing some really great things to lighten up their dress as well.
Let’s go ahead and turn that off and I’m going to show you guys how to do it from scratch.
Basically, we got the idea, it was really just an amazing image and I thought it might
be cool to play with light for the image. What we’re going to do is I’m going to
create a new layer right above our background here and the first thing I want to do is create
our little crown. It’s really not that hard to create. What we’re going to do is I’m
going to grab my polygonal [0:01:20.2] tool and I’m going to create a triangle shape
up here. You can create this in basically whatever shape you want. We’re just going
to stick with something like this. We’ve got our triangle shape there and now you’re
thinking, “Okay, do I got to make a million of these and array them,” and things like
that. You don’t because there’s a really cool thing in Photoshop called step and repeat
that’s just going to do it for you. What we’re going to do now is I’m going
to hold shift delete and we’re just going to fill this with … let’s just say fill
that with white. There we go. Let’s go ahead and just put this maybe, yes, just there off
to the left. That looks pretty good. What I want to do is be able to copy this over
and over again and scale it as I do it. Pay attention to the next few keyboard command
because they’re relatively important. First thing we’re going to do is hit control or
command and click on our thumbnail. That’s going to turn your layer into a selection.
That’s a really important step. The next is we’re going to hold down option
command or alt control, if you guys are on a PC, and then I’m going to hit T. So option
command is the step part of our transformation. What we’re going to do is I’m going to
move our little point right here. You can move your pivot point. If you‘re going over
it and it won’t let you … it won’t allow you to move it, you can also move it using
these guides right over here. Let’s move it to the very bottom here and then if I hover
over it I should be able to move it again. There we go. It’s allowing me to move my
little pivot point there. What that means is when I rotate it, it’s going to rotate
it around that point instead of around the middle. I’m going to hold the shift key
and there we go. Sorry, you don’t actually need to hold the shift key. We’re just going
to rotate this a little bit to the left there and you can see it’s copying it because
when you do a transform when something is selected like it is there, it’s going to
copy it over, that’s what’s called a step, and it’s going to be on the same layer.
What I’m going to do now is hold the shift and the option key, this is shift and alt
if you guys are on a PC, and make it a little bit smaller. There we go. That’s our transformation
and then I’m going to hit this checkbox up here and it’s going to apply it. What
we have now is our main shape and we’ve just transformed it and scaled it over a little
bit. That’s our step part of the step and repeat. Now comes the repeat part and this
is where it gets really cool; it’s actually really easy to do. Just hold the shift, option
and command, if you guys are on a PC it’s going to be shift, alt and control, and then
hit T a couple of times. Those three down and hit T. Each time you do it’s going to
apply that same exact transformation that you just did over and over and over and over
again. You can just keep hitting T a bunch of times now we’ve got that really cool
shape. So really not that hard. We’ve made that cool crown thing and just a couple of
steps. We’ve got half of a crown now or like a
fourth of it. What do we do to get a little bit more? I’m going to hit command J and
command J duplicates your layer. Command T, right click and then flip horizontal. Now
we’ve got something like this and we’ll just go ahead and bring that in there. You
can do this basically anyway you decided to make your crown or whatever you’re going
to make, lighting effects using the step and repeat. This is going to come out differently
everytime you do it because those transformations are … they’re just going to look a little
bit different. We’ll make this one and if we like it, we’ll stick with and if we don’t,
you can make a different one. Every single time you’re going to do this they’re going
to come out a little bit different. I’ve got that shape. I think it’s really
cool and now I’m just going to copy it over. I’m going hit command J. I went ahead and
grouped those two layers so they’re in a group now. I’m going to hit command J on
the group and then we’re just going to transform this. I’m going to kind of bring it out
and then holding down shift and alt for option, I’m going to stretch that as well. What
we’ve got now is basically the crown and it’s in two different shapes here. It’s
in the shape of the top part of the crown and then the bottom. I can drag this down,
kind of move it however we want, but I think that looks pretty good so far. This is going
to be our crown that’s on the top of our subject. Maybe I can go a little bit bigger
so let’s shift click to those and I’m going to hit command T which is going to bring
up our transform, grab our midpoint here and then just scale that out a little bit there.
Now we’ve got a point that’s quite a bit bigger. What are we going to do with it now?
We need to apply this into a curve’s adjustment layer so instead of just showing up white,
it’s actually going to look like it’s going to brighten up that area. We’ll show
you how to do that now. How do we transfer what we’ve already created onto a curve
adjustment layer? All we need to do is we’ve got those two layers; I’m going to hit command
E and that’s going to merge them together so there are two groups. We’ve got those
together now. We’re going to hold down control or command and I’m going to click on this
shape and that’s going to turn that into a selection. You can see now that we have
a selection it’s probably going to be pretty easy to apply that into a curve adjustment
layer. All you need to do is grab an adjustment layer when you go down with the curve and
what it’s going to do is it’s going to automatically load up selection as a layer
mask. If you have a selection already active and you grabbed an adjustment layer, it’s
going to load up selection as a layer mask. It’s going to be invisible there so let’s
just grab our curve adjustment layer and I’m going to really just crank that part a bit
brighter and then we have our really cool lighting effect just like that. We can see
it really doesn’t take a whole long time to get something like this. Now because I
wanted to … I like creating things in a bunch of different layers. It tends to make
things look a little more real and just give that a little bit more effect. We’re creating
a light crown. It’s not exactly going to look real no matter what you do but it’s
going to look a little bit more like a cool effect. I’m going to hit command J to duplicate
that again and now we’re just going to give this a blur. Here on the layer mask we’re
going to go filter, blur and then down the Gaussian blur. Something like that you can
just decide for yourself whatever is going to look a little bit best. It’s just going
to give it a little of … keep it from being one dimensional, just adds a little bit more
to the entire blur and you can change your opacity and kind of play around there as much
as you want. Very cool. Keep in mind this has nothing to do with our
subject. If I wanted to, let’s go ahead and group those out, maybe I want to make
them just a little bit bigger and bring it down. There we go. That looks pretty cool.
I can put a layer mask on that entire group and this is where I can define where I want
this to be invisible and where I want it to be visible. I’m going to stay away from
… I’m not going to try to do a perfect job cutting out all these things that are
already here. If you wanted to, be my guest. You can cut things out, but oftentimes I find,
especially with light, it’s a little bit better to blend and because we do already
have this nice light face, it should allow us to blend relatively well. That’s what
I’m going to stick to, but of course when you guys are working on your images you can
do whatever you want. All right. There we go. Cool. We’re just sticking to blending
and it just makes my job quite a bit easier. We’re going to do a little bit more for
this. I’m going to grab a new layer. We’re going to bring this under, actually, the layer
we were just painting on. I’m just going to grab a grading tool, G for the grading
tool, let’s cover night like color that’s here in … I don’t know if you want to
grab white. Maybe it’s just something that’s right there in the crown. We’re going to
use our radial gradient. Click on our gradient editor and make sure you’re using the program
to foreground to transparent and then click right here in the middle and drag out. That’s
going to create that nice little halo again. We don’t want this to darken anything. It’s
supposed to be light so we’re going to go from normal down here to lighten. It’s going
to make sure we’re not darkening the side of a face and things like that. Let’s put
a layer mask on this and then you paint away wherever you want to as well. Make it a little
bit less. Generally, when things look like perfect circles and things like that in Photoshop,
it just looks like you did them in Photoshop. I try to put a layer mask and just paint around
with some weird shapes on there. It’s going to break it up. You can see here the before
just looks like a circle that was made in Photoshop and it’s just a little bit more
natural. I don’t know if we’re making a crazy light crown on our queen of the forest
so nothing about this image is natural but it doesn’t look as Photoshopy.
Now let’s go ahead and bring this in … I want to bring some of these lighting effects
that I really like onto not only the top here so it looks like it’s actually affecting
the rest of our subject but even on down to our dress area. We’re going to do that by
grabbing another curve adjustment layer. Let’s go to our adjustment layers and go up here
to curves and then we’re going to click and just really drag that up. Looking good.
Let’s go ahead and bring that up to the very top and then I’m going to hit command
I on that and we’re going to paint white here on our subject just right up here. I’m
actually going to this over two different layers and I’m going to show you guys why
in just a second. I’m going to try to imitate some of the light falloff from the crown here.
I’m going to take care of the top part and then I’m going to take care of the bottom
part of our dress completely differently. Sorry, the same, just a little bit less intensity.
I’ve got that up there and I think it looks good. Let’s get it to apply. This is a good
hint: whenever you guys are trying to add a bit of light to an image, you can use something
called apply image which just basically puts on your layer mask and it makes the dark a
little bit darker on your layer mask and it just has the light not show up where the darks
are. It continues to lighten your highlights and it ignores the shadows. It just makes
everything blend a lot better. What we’re going to do is I’m going to go up here to
image, down here to apply image and you would do this right here on your layer mask. This
is what my layer mask looks like before. We’re going to let image down here to apply image
and let’s go over here and you can see already taking effect. There’s the preview. There
is the before and the after. You can see it just looks quite a bit more natural. What
you want to do is choose merge, RGB is multiply, opacity 100 and you’re good to go.
This is what my layer mask looks like now. It takes the snapshot of our image wherever
is darker doesn’t show up and wherever is lighter does show up which is perfect for
adding some highlights. If you want to go a little bit more, make it subtle, just do
it again. Image, down here to apply image and you could see it’s going to be a little
bit more subtle now. You can decide how bright or how dark you want this. It’s totally
up to you. I’m going to do the same thing again just because I do want to brighten the
dress up but I want it to be a little bit not as bright. We’re going to grab our curve
adjustment layer again. Let’s brighten that up right above there. I’m going to hit command
I and here on our dress, there we go, we’re going to paint this in as well and then I’m
going to go to image and down here to apply image. Let’s just do that again. There we
go. We can see, there’s a little bit overlap here so if I want to just … this is what
my layer mask looks like now. It goes from being just a white blob to something with
a lot of detail, which is very cool. Generally, I don’t like to destroy the detail that’s
in there. If I take it and I just start painting black now, what happens is I destroy all the
detail that’s there. Generally, what I do instead of just painting black on this layer
mask, I will group this layer with itself. I’m going to hit command G, group that layer
with itself and then I can put a layer mask on that group. Then I can start to fade some
things away if I want them and I don’t have to worry about affecting this because I am
affecting this instead. Thanks creative light. They’re tweeting at me here. We can affect
the layer mask on the group instead of the actual layer mask on the layer and that’s
just going to help me blend everything just a little bit better. Very cool. We’ll just
grab one final effect. I’m going to just put a little bit of light and a little bit
of color on this because when you add light forces I think it’s a good time and I think
it’s a little bit of fun to add a little color.
We’re going to bring up our RGB but I’m also going to grab our blues and I’m going
to pull that up a little bit and then I’m going to grab our greens and I’m going to
pull that up a little bit as well. Maybe the light that’s coming out of her head has
got a little bit of color into it too. It’s just not a white light. It’s going to have
a little bit of color. There we go. We can just paint around and imitate a bright glow
there. Very cool. So you can see it just adds that little bit of color and maybe put a little
bit in her dress there. We can even do image down here to apply image. You know what? I
don’t even like that. I think it looked better before. There we go. Adding that little
bit of a light glow. You guys can see, that really didn’t take too long. I don’t know
if this would have any effect, any application on any of your images, but if it does this
is really, this is a really cool way to make a shape with light and have it affect the
rest of your image. Guys, thanks so much for watching this tutorial.
I hope you really loved it. Find a lot more here at phlearn.com. We’ve got over 450
videos for free. That’s a lot and it should take up quite a bit of your life watching
them. Taking up quite a bit of mine making them. Thanks guys. I’ll phlearn you later.
Bye everyone.