Photoshop Effects: Focus With Light
Photoshop Effects and Photo Effects at Photoshop Essentials.com
Written By Steve Patterson
In this Photoshop tutorial, we'll learn how to add focus to an image with light using Photoshop's Lighting Effects filter. We'll see how easy it is to add multiple light sources to the same photo, rather than limiting ourselves to a single light source, so we can control both where the light is coming from and its reflections.
Here's the image I'll be working with:
I want to bring more attention to the flower and the woman's face while reducing the importance of the rest of the image. There's lots of different ways to do that with Photoshop, but in this tutorial, we're going to focus attention using light. Even a subtle amount of lighting is often enough to do the trick, as you can see in our Simple Focused Lighting Effect tutorial, but here, I think I'll go for a more intense effect. Here's the result I'm after:
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Let's get started!
Step 1: Duplicate Your Background Layer
The first thing we need to do is duplicate our Background layer since it contains our original image data and we always want to keep that safe in case we need it. To quickly copy the Background layer, use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac). Nothing will appear different in the document window, but we can see in the Layers palette that we now have a copy of the Background layer sitting above the original. Photoshop automatically named the new layer "Layer 1":
Normally I would rename the layer to something more descriptive than "Layer 1", but since this effect only requires two layers, unless you have nothing better to do, there's no need to rename it.
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