On this video tutorial Aaron Nace from Phlearn demonstrates how to add beautiful light rays to shine through clouds in your images using Adobe Photoshop.
This video is all about enhancing your photos – it isn’t for everyone as this actually adds content to your image (not a practice every photographer is necessary O.K. with, but if you are go ahead – we are not here to judge.
First it is important to realize that you need your light rays to come from a light source and you need to be able to find this source and make the combination look realistic in your photo. You should start by identifying the light source in an image and then duplicate the background layer.
The next step is to duplicate to a smart object which should allow us to use a smart filter (which you can change after using them easily (something that you can’t necessarily do that easily with a regular filter in Photoshop). The filter that we shall use is a radial filter – Go to “filter”> blur > radial blur and choose ‘zoom’. Change the zoom level – anything over 90 should be O.K. – next choose a blur center and hit ‘ok’.
You will probably need to adjust the blur center, double click on the smart filter and move the blur center until you get it right where you want it.
Now it is time to make the light rays. Open a new layer and use the brush tool to paint daubs of white around the light source. Press CTL/CMD+F to apply the radial blur filter to the paint daubs, stretching them into light rays. Do this until the rays looks perfect!
You can find many more Photoshop video tutorials on LensVid’s Photoshop section (and you can find a lot more Phlearn videos on our special Phlearn subsection).