Adobe Photoshop Tutorials - Photo Effects

Photoshop Effects: Focus With Light

Photoshop Effects and Photo Effects at Photoshop Essentials.com

Step 2: Open The Lighting Effects Filter

With "Layer 1" selected in the Layers palette (selected layers are highlighted in blue), let's bring up Photoshop's Lighting Effects filter. Go up to the Filter menu at the top of the screen, choose Render, and then choose Lighting Effects. This brings up the large Lighting Effects dialog box, with a preview area on the left and various options and settings along the right:

Photoshop's Lighting Effects filter dialog box. Image © 2009 Photoshop Essentials.com.
Photoshop's Lighting Effects filter dialog box.

If you've never used the Lighting Effects filter before, you may be looking at its dialog box and thinking "Okay, there's no way I can do this". Don't worry, you can safely ignore most of the options in the dialog box for this effect. There's only a few things we're going to be doing here, and they're very simple.

Step 3: Select The "Flashlight" Lighting Style

The first option we're going to change is the one at the very top, the lighting Style. Click on the down-pointing arrow to bring up a list of available styles and choose Flashlight from the list:

Select the Flashlight lighting style. Image © 2009 Photoshop Essentials.com.
Select the "Flashlight" lighting style from the list.

As soon as you select the Flashlight style, the image in the preview area on the left of the Lighting Effects dialog box changes to show the new lighting style. The Flashlight style is pretty much what you'd expect to see if you were to shine a flashlight on your subject. Notice how the rest of the image darkens and only the area lit up by the light source remains visible:

The preview window of the Lighting Effects filter dialog box. Image © 2009 Photoshop Essentials.com
The preview area on the left changes to show how the Flashlight effect currently looks.

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