in today's video I'm going to show you an easy technique for adding light rays to an image using
Photoshop I'm starting with this Woodland scene that I shot a few years ago there's already a
fair bit of mist in the scene as well as a bright area of light now these are the perfect conditions
to produce believable light rays in an image the tool I'll be using to draw my light rays on this
image is the basic line tool after selecting the line tool from the Photoshop tools palette I'll
set the weight of the line to around 80 pixels I'll then draw several White Lines onto the image
as I do this I'm careful to make them converge on a single point it's these lines that will
create the individual light rays notice that each time I draw a new line Photoshop adds it as a new
layer when I've drawn several lines I'll select each of these layers by clicking them with my
mouse whilst holding down the shift key I can then merge the layers together by pressing command e on
my keyboard if you're using a Windows PC that's control trolling a now I'm going to select the
background layer by clicking on it in the layers window the reason I'm doing this is that I want
to change the weight of the line tool without affecting any of the lines that I've already
drawn this time I'm going to draw the lines with a thickness of around 50 pixels you may need to
experiment with different line thicknesses when you come to do this as it does depend on the size
of the image as before I'm drawing all the lines as if they're coming from a single light source
when I've finished drawing I can select the layers again and merge them by pressing command e on my
keyboard I'll then click on the background layer again so I can change the way to the lines to B25
pixels now I can draw several thinner lines onto the image remember light rays in nature
are never a consistent thickness so you need to keep varying the width of the lines that you draw
finally I'll merge all the line layers by selecting them and then pressing command and E
I'll leave it there for this example but when you come to do this you may want to consider adding
more and thinner lines to the image next I need to use the move tool from the tools palette to Center
the lines on the image what I'm trying to do is move the point where the lines meet to be over
the center of the image that's because we're going to use a filter to blur these lines and it works
from the center point in the image to help me find the center I'll add two guidelines to the image
I'll just turn off the layer containing the lines whilst I add the new guides from The View menu the
first guide will be a vertical guide and I'll drag it over with my mouse to the center of the image
you'll know when you get to the center point of the image because the guide just seems to snap
into position next I'll add a second guide but this time I'll make it horizontal then I can drag
it down the image until it snaps onto the center I now know where the center of the image is so so I
can make the lines layer visible and drag it into position now it's time to apply the blur filter to
this layer to produce the light rays but before I do that I want to convert the layer to use Smart
filters this means that if the filter settings don't work I can continue to adjust them when the
layer is being converted to a Smart object I can apply the radial blur filter to it from the filter
menu I'm going to start by trying a value of around 20 and I want to use the spin blur method
this seems to have produced a reasonable effect but if it didn't I can still double
click on the filter on the smart object to change to another value
you should now be able to see that this is creating lines that look a bit like light rays
let's clear the guides Now by clicking View and then clear guides in the menu I can now use the
move tool to click and drag the light rays back into position the next step is to add a mask to
the layer so that I can blend the light rays into the image with the layer selected in the layers
window I'll click the icon to add a new layer mask at the bottom of the window I can then paint using
black and a soft brush onto the mask to hide any areas that I don't want to see the light rays now
look quite convincing but you may find changing the layer blend mode to screen improves them
you might also want to experiment with changing the opacity of the layer to make the light rays
appear more natural now because this is a smart object it does have some limitations if I want
to resize or rotate the light rays I first need to rasterize the layer this converts it from a
smart object into a pixel layer that I can then manipulate you can do this by right clicking on
the layer in the layers window and then selecting rasterize layer in the pop-up menu after that I
can resize the layer as well as rotate it to improve the direction of the light rays despite
this minor limitation the smart object feature can be incredibly useful for photo editing as
I demonstrate in this next video thanks for watching today I hope you found this video
helpful and if you haven't already don't forget to subscribe I'll see you soon for another video