Today we’re going to show you how to bring a ball of energy to life in Photoshop. Hey
guys welcome to Phlearn and my name is Aaron Nace and you can fine me on Twitter at AKNacer.
Today we’re taking a really cool image and it was submitted by AP in last week’s contest
and won a Phlearn Pro for this image and we’re editing it here on Phlearn. This is a very
cool image and basically, he cloned himself multiple times and he has a light source that
he’s actually using in kind of like in a Street Fighter tactic, which Street Fighter
is pretty cool with me. We’re going to be showing you guys how to enhance this a little
bit more. We’re going to use some colors and create some light flares and it’s a
really, really cool effect, so let’s go ahead in get into it.
So here’s our image and it’s really cool. We have a light glowing effect and basically,
this is going to be blinding everyone and maybe he’s even going to be throwing it
at the person here. We have a blue light coming s well, so we’re going to take some of these
queues that are already in this image with the blue light and enhance him a little bit
more. To do that it’s actually really simple, we’re going to grab an adjustment layer
and I’m going to go to hue/saturation. Now a lot of people edit this here like the
master slider where you can kind of change the hue/saturation of everything and that’s
totally cool, but you can actually get this quite a bit more refined. You can do so by
going over here to your master and let’s say, we’re going to go down to our blue
channel … sorry it’s not your blue it’s just your blues. Now I’m going to choose
the eye dropper and actually choose around the blues I want to edit, so now instead of
saying this is a general blue and we’re going to edit actually this blue that we can
see here. From here I can take it and change it around
and you can see it’s not really affecting his skin tones or anything it’s just changing
that blue. I’m going to put maybe just a little bit of green in in and maybe we’re
going to bump up our saturation just to make this … it really is a very bright glowing
light orb. There we go. Pumping that up just a little bit. To enhance that a little bit
more, we’re going to add that effect over the top of the entire image. We’re going
to go to our curves adjustment layer and I’m going to go over here to our green channel
and I’m going to pull our greens up just a bit, there we go and pull our blues up.
Now I don’t want to do just blue, because there was a little bit of green in there,
so almost like a teal color and that’s why we went to both our blue channel and our green
channel. Now we started off with this and we added a little of color in there and just
changed it a little bit, added the saturation and then basically, brought that color into
the whole image, so it really does look as though that light source … you can see it
here especially in the subjects here on the left, it really does look as though it’s
lighting them just a little bit more than what we started with, so already really cool.
Now you can work a lot with complementary colors on an image like this if you’re adding
blues and greens to the highlights, you can add warm colors into the shadows and it’s
going to create a really nice play. You can do that really easily a couple of ways. I’m
actually going to do … I’m going to use a way that I … I don’t think I’ve ever
shown before, because it’s not incredibly common, but I like showing you guys different
ways to do things. What we’re going to do is, I’m going to choose this dark orange
color. There we go. I’m going to fill my foreground with this color, so hold down alt
or option and it’s going to fill with your foreground color. Okay, so we have this color
and now we’re going to change this layer mode down to lighten. Basically, what this
is going to do is anything that is actually lighter than this color it’s not going to
show up and anything that’s darker than this color it is going to show up. This is
a really great method for adding some color into your shadows.
Now it’s not exactly what we want it to be just yet, not a big deal. What I’m going
to do is hit command U and then we can actually change the color of this layer, so I can change
maybe the lightness and just bring that down a little bit. I can bring up my saturation
and I can even change my hue as we need to. There we go. You can see this is a really
nice easy way to bring some color into those shadows––let’s hit okay––and still
maintain quite a bit of control. There is the before and after of bringing that color
in. Maybe we’ll bring down our opacity a little bit. It’s just warming up our shadows
a little bit, which is going to create a nicer contrast with the highlights in that bluish
green color. You can do a similar thing with curves or
levels and I’ll show you guys how to do that as well. Here in curves you could grab
your green channel. Let’s go down here and bring this up … sorry I meant to grab the
red channel. All right, the red channel we’ll click over here and drag that up, which is
going to add some reds into the shadows and maybe we will go to the blue channel––there
we go––and click and drag … no I want to go to the green channel again. I’m getting
all confused today, but that’s part of the fun of the learning process. There we go.
Okay, so you can do the same thing by warming up your shadows just a little bit there as
well. Either of these techniques … they’re both going to act a little bit differently
and you could even use them in conjunction with one another. I actually light this one
a little bit more, so we’re going to stick with that guy. Just wanted to show you guys
a couple different ways you could actually do things in Photoshop.
All right, so we have our really nice light glow and now I’m going to go ahead and enhance
this a little bit more and what we’re going to do is, I’m going to create a new layer,
so shift, option, command N and then shift, option, command E is going to make a stamped
visible layer. Basically, this just takes every layer you see and puts it on a new layer.
We’re going to put a … we’re going to go down to filter and I’m going to go over
here to render and we’re going to put a lens flare on this. Lens flares are generally
pretty tacky, but if you have a light source like this in your image, a lens flare is the
perfect thing to do. I’m going to show you guys how to enhance it and make it not as
tacky. Basically, you can move your lens flare anywhere you want, right over here. You generally
want to put it right where you light source is, so I’m trying to put it right in the
center of this glowing ball. We’re going to hit okay and that’s going to put a lens
flare right in the middle of that guy. Now I like to be able to move my lens flare,
because if it’s stuck on this layer then I can’t move just he lens flare, I can’t
change the color of it and I can’t really do anything. What I’m going to do now is
fill this layer with black, so I’m going to hit shift, delete and I’m going to say
contents used, black and hit okay. Now we’re going to go up to filter and I’m going to
go down to lens flare and it’s going to apply the same lens flare that we used earlier.
It’s just a black layer with the same lens flare on there and now we're going to change
this layer from blending mode down to screen. What’s really cool is, I can turn this lens
flare on and off now, because we’re using a blending mode to get the lens flare there
instead of having it actually visible on a layer.
We can also do other cool things like, I can hit command U just like we did earlier with
the color for here and I can change the color of the lens flare. Let’s say I want to pull
it a little bit more towards the green side and then it’s actually going to work a little
bit and you can see it’s going to help add to the dimension of our little glow thing
there, which is totally cool. Then get these other cool lighting effects and artifacts
to sale the image a little bit more. All right, almost done there are just a couple more things
I want to do. I’m going to grab another curves adjustment layer. I really like adding
a lot of depth to glowing effects like this, I think it helps create the effect a little
bit more. What I’m going to do is, I’m going to pump up this green channel and on
my layer mask I’m going to hit command I, which is going to invert that and then I’m
going to use my gradient tool and we’re going to use the radial gradient going from
the foreground to transparent and I’m going to hit okay. Then I’m going to click right
in here and drag out. What that did is, it made a layer mask that looks like this, just
a nice round area and the center of it is now green. Incredible right? It adds a little
bit more effect to the overall thing. Now I’m going to show you guys a really
cool way to make a J.J. Abrams type of lens flare. If you guys have seen Star Trek or
things like that, you’ll know J.J. Abrams loves lens flares and they’re really fun.
What I’m going to do is, I’m going to use my clone stamp tool and we’ve got a
current and below sample here, so it’s going to sample basically everything. I’m just
going to sample this area and paint some of this over here. It really doesn’t matter
what kind of detail you have in here, we’re just sampling the lighter areas, that’s
our general goal here. Okay, so on a new layer I’ve sampled and I’ve painted this on
it. You’re like, wow that looks horrible there Aaron congratulations. Well, we’re
going to warp it and it’s going to look great, so there. To do that, hit command T
and then you can grab your corners here and warp these around. There we go. So you have
something like that. These little details in here, they’re actually going to look
really nice, because it’s going to make it not look like it was painted in Photoshop,
it’s going to make it look a little more organic.
Now you can change this from normal down to color dodge and let’s squish it up even
more. There we go. Kind of play around with these. Isn’t that a nice J.J. Abrams like
lens flare effect. It’s like, wow I’m on the set of Star Wars amazing. You can do
that over and over again. You can move them around and things like that and change your
opacity. Color dodge works, screen also works a couple different cool blending modes and
you can play around with the opacity there. Just a really cool effect and you can see
by using the clone stamp instead of a regular brush and you have this nice color with the
reds a little bit of variation here with that effect and it kind of sales it a little bit
more. All right, that is how to enhance a glowing
ball of energy. Let’s look at our before and after. Here’s our before a very cool
image and the after we drew a little bit more attention to the light orb and just used it
to help color the image just a little bit more. So a really cool way to add a little
more interest to something like this. If you guys have ever created a light orb, submit
it in the comment down below, I would love to see it and you guys can now J.J. Abrams
the mess out of those lens flares. Guys, thanks so much for watching Phlearn and I hope you
enjoyed this episode, I’ll Phlearn you later. Bye everyone.
Today’s episode is brought to you by J.J. Abrams.