The TRICK to making REALISTIC LENS FLARES in PHOTOSHOP

 

Credit by :  photoshopCAFE

The Trick to Making Realistic Lens Flares in PhotoshopHey Cafe crew, it’s Colin Smith here and this week, I'm going to show you how to creates non-destructive lens flare. So we're going to add a little bit of life and drama to this photograph and really just give it a flavor, so let's add the lens flare. Now one of the things to be aware of when you're applying a Lens Flare directly onto the layer, it's a destructive effect. But if you create a new layer, you can apply it. So let me show you some of the things that can happen. If we can choose Filter, Lens Flare, notice it won't apply it because there's nothing in there. So one of the things you can do is we can fill this layer with 50% gray and, now, wean apply a lens flare. So if we go under Filter and then we go to Render, we get to apply the Lens Flare. But the problem with this we can move it around, we can do all kinds of things we want, butte problem is we can't see the image. So I'm going to show you a little trick here that's going to enable you to perfectly alignit and also get to use it on this gray layer. So I'm just going to hide that layer, go back to the background and now we're going to choose Filter, Render, and be aware the Render effects here only work in RGB mode, so if you're infamy, you have to convert it. Let's get a Lens Flare. Now we get to see it on the image. Now some pointer on where we place this image because you can't just have the Lens Flare just happening out in the middle of nowhere. Indeed, it has to be coming directly from a light source such as directly from the sun itself or it could be reflected off the glass, which works fine. If you ever set foot off the coffee shop before a car pulls up, and then you get that light just glaring right in your eyes, you know what I mean. All right, so let's get a dropping in there. So this is the standard lens flare that everybody uses. It's the 50-300 and then it just creates this kind of effect. But what I'm going to do in this case, we're not going to do that. We're going to try a different one. I'm going to try the 105 Prime here and notice it just looks a little different than the lens flare you're used to seeing. Now you can turn the brightness up really bright or turn it down. Let's get it up to about, I'm kind of liking it about there, so now I'm going to click OK. Now, we applied our lens flare, but the problem is, notice it's destructive, that means it'smerged into that layer. So what we're going to do is we're going to hit Ctrl Z to undo it. Now, we're going to turn on our gray layer and we're going to change it to Hard Light. And what it does is it creates invisible because Hard Light is not going to show gray, butnow we're going to apply the Filter, but we want to apply exactly the same place we didit before. Now if we can do that, if we hit Ctrl F or Command F on Mac, that will repeat the last filter and boom. Notice, now, we have our Lens Flare in exactly the same location, and by the way, you canals go up under Filter here and choose the Lens Flare, but the difference is I can turnit on or off, so we have exactly the same Lens Flare but we can move it around and wecan do different things with it. So I'm going to put it back to where it was. We can play around with the Opacity because now we've got a little bit more flexibility in that Lens Flare. We can also try different Blend Modes, such as maybe a Linear Light, which will really blow it out, or we could go down to just an Overlay, and that will make it a lot more subtle. I'm going to go back to our Hard Light because I kind of like how that looks and I'm just going to drop it down just ever so much. So here we go. We've got our light hitting here and kind of reflecting off. Now what we want to do just to give it a little bit of flavor is we're going to give it some color, so like that sunlight is just kind of coming in with this nice kind of beam. So we're going to create a brand new layer that goes on the top, and then, for the foreground we want to choose a nice orange color like that reddy orange nice, you know, sunset kind of a color. So we're just going to click OK, now we're going to go up to our Gradient, hit the Key for that, and then, what you want to do is choose the second option, which is going to be the foreground to transparent. Make sure it's set to Linear and also, make sure you got Transparency turned on. Now what we're going to do is we're just going to click from the top here and just drag itout like that. Now we change the Blend Mode here to something different. We can have a look at, maybe, Overlay there or we could try Soft Light and just look atthe difference there. See that?So it's just giving you that nice kind of color. The Overlay will make it a little bit stronger, but I kind of like the Soft Light. You can play around with some different blending modes. Linear Light can, you know, once again, look pretty harsh, but you can play around withthe different modes. So I'm just going to put this one back into Overlay. And if we look at what we did, there's the picture before and there's the picture after adding that Lens Flare and that nice kind of sunset atmospheric effect. So I hope you enjoyed this. If you did, don't forget to become part of the Cafe crew by hitting that Subscribe button right now and you'll get a new tutorial every single week. So, thanks guys. Add a comment. Add a Like. And until next week, I'll see you at the Cafe.