- [Glyn] Hi folks, Glyn here,
back with another video for you.
Real quick one here.
Just want to show you how we can go about
creating the lens flare that you can see
on this action figure here of Superman.
So we're gonna go from something like this
to something like this.
(typewriter clicking)
Okay, so rather than making the lens flare from scratch,
we're actually going to use one from a stock image site
and I'm gonna use Adobe Stock.
To access that, I'm gonna go to my creative cloud icon here
and just in the search, I'm gonna type in lens flare.
So we type in lens flare and you'll see straight away,
lots of results come up.
We can drag this out.
We can make it nice and big so we get
to see more than one at a time.
And we can scroll through and find, hopefully,
the kind of lens flare that we want.
Now you can use any stock site that you prefer to use.
I prefer to use this one for a number of reasons.
The main one is that I can maybe find one that I like,
let's say we like this one down here.
I can click on this little icon here to download it
and that'll put it into my library.
I can then double-click to use it.
Let's just drag this out of the way now.
I can then double-click to use it
and this is the full-res, high-def
kind of version of this lens flare.
It has got this watermark over it,
but I can use the actual graphic here
and decide whether or not I like it.
If I don't like it, I've wasted no money.
I can get rid of it.
If I do like it, back over in my library,
where we find that particular download,
if I right-click on it and click on licence image
I can then pay a small fee.
I think it's around about five pounds, something like that,
and that will then remove the watermark
for me to use the image from then on.
So I like that.
It's kind of like a try before you buy.
Now I've actually got one that I am going to be using
and that's this one, there we go.
Let's have a look in my library.
I've got a few of them saved in here.
Lens flares.
We're gonna use this one.
So I'm gonna double-click on this one to open it up
and let's just close that library down.
So this is the graphic I want to use.
Obviously, it's in colour, so there's a couple
of things we're going to do to it first of all.
We're gonna go to image, adjustments
and I'm gonna go to desaturate to remove the colour of it.
We still got some patchy kind of areas here
where it's not completely black.
What I really need here now
is just a black and white image.
So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna press down
command or control l to bring up my levels adjustment here.
I'm gonna click on this little teat pipette here,
this slightly black point sample here.
So I'm gonna click on that,
and then I'm gonna bring that cursor over
into the image and click just below the bright area.
Somewhere around the grey part, just around about here
to tell Photoshop anything that's directly underneath
the black point sample here,
anything of that kind of tone,
change it to completely black.
So now we can see it's really kind of added
a lot more black into the image,
but we're still left with this nice, white area here.
So just click okay to close that down.
Now, I don't need all this stuff at the bottom,
so let's get the crop tool by pressing c
and then I click and drag that up
and that leaves us with a nice, lens flare there.
Okay, so what I'm gonna do now then,
we'll go to select all and then edit and copy.
Let's go back now to our Superman image
and let's just get rid of all
this stuff here that we don't need.
Get rid of that so it takes it to the point
where we need to add in the lens flare.
And then I'm also gonna go to edit and paste.
Now it's quite big at the moment,
so what I'm gonna do is press command or control t
to get the transform handles
and we'll just drag it downwards.
Something like this, just so that it gets
around about the right kind of size we want
and press enter or return to commit that.
Now I can drag this around,
but it's quite difficult to see exactly
where I'm gonna place it with all this black around it
and this is where the magic
of blend modes comes into Photoshop,
because all I need to do now to get rid of the dark areas,
but keep the bright areas, is come up to the layers panel
and change the blend mode from normal to screen
and it immediately knocks it out,
so we can see now we're just left with the bright flare,
which is actually what we wanted.
Now I'm gonna position that over his shoulder
somewhere around about there.
I might actually even go to the transform again
and let's just make it just a little bit bigger.
Something like that.
That's more like it.
Rest it over his shoulder, something like that.
Now at the moment, as well,
you can see if I look on either side here,
it's kind of going off the screen.
I don't want it to go quite as sharply off the screen there
so what I'll now do is just add a layer mask
to this lens flare layer
and we'll come up to the tool bar and choose a gradient.
Now with my foreground colour set to black,
we know that black conceals and white reveals,
I'm just gonna use a gradient that
is just this second one along here.
Black to transparent.
So that's the second one.
Click okay and then all I have to do
is just click outside of the canvas area over on the left
and drag in across to the right
and that'll start to soften that down here,
so it doesn't disappear off quite so harshly.
And we'll do that over on the right hand side as well.
So we can go from that to that.
Now, you can see in the final picture,
we sorted out this Man of Steel's arms,
'cause at the moment they look just like toys,
but that's a real simple and quick way
of making a lens flare.
Now of course, it doesn't have to stop there.
You might want to add a little bit of colour into it.
So all you need to do then is go into something
like a hue and saturation adjustment layer.
Make sure that you click on the clipping mask icon
just at the bottom down here, this little icon.
If we click on that it'll then tell Photoshop
that any adjustments we make now
are only going to affect the layer directly below,
which is the lens flare.
So let's click on colourize and now you can change
the colour of the lens flare that we want.
So we can come and change the hue.
We could even change the saturation if we wanted to,
but don't play around with the lightness,
'cause when you do that, you'll start to notice
that the original shape of that lens flare
layer where we'd actually trimmed it,
starts to come into play.
So play around with the hue for sure,
and also the saturation.
So there you go, very, very quick way
that you can add a lens flare using a stock photo.
Now if you want to know more about
this particular picture that we're got here,
if you go over to my website, glyndewis.com,
there's a little blog post that I actually created there
and that'll take you through the idea behind this picture,
why I came up with it and how I actually photographed it.
So you can get to see some of the
behind the scenes pictures there, how I set it up,
'cause this is obviously one
of those little hot toys, miniatures,
where I got the idea from with the original
Man of Steel poster and obviously the final image as well.
So that's on the blog
and the reason I've been so quiet lately,
I've been finishing off my new book,
Photograph Like a Thief.
This book is out early 2017.
It's scheduled for March and in there,
one of the chapters takes you through
all of the retouching of that Man of Steel picture,
so we've got the photography side of it
and the retouching as well,
but I've been away for a few weeks finishing it all off,
so sorry about the absence, but I thought I'd just
dive in with a quick video for you.
Thanks for tuning it.
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But that's it for me.
I shall catch you next time.
(typewriter clicking)