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Lighting Effects

Lesson 22 from: Adobe Photoshop: Creative Explorations, Lighting Effects & More

Ben Willmore

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Lesson Info

22. Lighting Effects

Next Lesson: Displacement Maps

Lesson Info

Lighting Effects

Gonna go to the filter menu I'm gonna choose render and that's where I should find lighting effects now lighting the faxes a filter that adobe removed from photo shopped at one time and they finally put it back in and I think it might have been in photo shop cs five that they removed it so if you have c s five uh you're probably not gonna find lighting effects and in c s six they put it back why the heck would they do that? Well, I think the reason they did it is they needed to re program photo shop to make it so can handle more memory in order to do that they needed to re program darn near the whole program and they just looked at it and said, is there any feature in there that we want to spend a good amount of time changing and updating that maybe will put off to do it for the next revision and so in order to make it so we can, uh, get the rest of photo shop working with more memory we're just going to take out a few features and we'll put him back in later when we get time that's wh...

at happened? That's when photo shop went from being I think it's noticed thirty two bit to being sixty four bit and that means that can access more memory so anyway lighting effects when I choose lighting effects it just plops the light on top of my picture to begin with in in the upper left there's a pop up menu called presets and if I want to start with something I can go up there and choose from this list the list isn't that exciting though got a two o'clock spotlight get a blue light you know it's like how many of these do you actually want to start with you? I need that a lot you know that was not bad but so these presets are not all that useful at least I don't find them to be who that was not bad making karen light out but you can save your own presets do you see the lower than the safe choice here? And if you ever see this menu say custom, all that means is you're not used every set you've done something to deviate from a preset if it ever says custom, so I'm not going to use the process but you say no there there then just to the right of the presets we have three icons in clicking on those three icons are going to add additional light sources and we have three types of light sources it's kind of hard to see but that's supposed to look like a spotlight that's supposed to look like just a lightbulb and that's supposed to look like the sun so this one is known as a spotlight and it acts like a flashlight if you think about a flashlight it has a definite direction and it has a definite area that it's falling onto if you think about a light bulb it doesn't have a definite direction itjust illuminates in all directions from wherever the originalists and if you think about the sun the sun is infinitely far away and you can just determine what direction is it from you you know so is the sun over on the left of the sky or is it on the right and um how bright is so those are the three kinds of light sources we have and let's see what we can do with him so this is just one that I got from a preset you can tell what kind it is by looking on the right side because these over in the lower right is a list of the lights you've added so far each time you click on those little three icons I showed you a new one of these would show up and you can build them up you can have eight light sources ten light sources whatever and you're going to find a list here and they'll be in the order that you created them so this is the one that the preset happened to have popped in there it's called a point light and that means that acts like a lightbulb so we'll start with that all I'm going to do is take this point light. It has little illustration of it here if you don't want to see this illustration of it with a little circle and things just type command h control agent windows it's still there, you're just not seeing the controls for it type command age again and you see controls, you can click on this middle part and move it around, and you can see how it's illuminating the image I'm going to put it right where I want there to be a light source right where that light is right then if I move just outside of that little centre circle dot thinking, I'll call it a pin because I think that's what a goby likes to call those there's an outer ring in that little ring tells you how bright the light is. So you see this little white part of that circle? Well, if I click on that, aiken drag around and I can make it up to an intensive one hundred such as bright as it can go, or I could bring it down to dim it, bring it all the way off. You can even put it negative wanted toe like, suck some light out of the rest of the scene. So I'm gonna go in here and just try to get a little bit of light there because I want that too look like a you know that little lamp that's sitting there uh with that you could also click on the outer circle to scale it say how much you know? Does it illuminate out how far does it go out? Is it, eh? And I'm gonna have that be relatively close just so that it can look like a little shining bulb sitting there with that on the right side once I have a light, here are the settings for that particular light and the settings for the surface that it's falling on. So up here is the actual light there's a pop up menu where I can have it switch between a point they spot in an infinite light ah, those were the same three types of lights we saw on the left side. The difference between the pop up menu in the icons is clicking the icons adds an additional light. I can't use the icons to change an existing light. This is where I change in existing light to say instead of being a point I wanted this to be a spotlight, that kind of thing then moving that little ring that we had that controlled the intensity all that was doing was changing this slider right here so moving this does the exact same thing so you can either do it over on the right side of my screen or I could do it by moving over here when I'm done moving it, you'll just see that number update, then we also have a color. So instead of having a white light source in this case, I actually want that to look like a kind of yellowish orange light source, so I'll click on this little rectangle next to the word color that should bring me into a color picture and in the color picture, it shows me the current color, the light and in slightly yellowish I'm gonna bring it over here so it's a little bit more vivid of a yellow for I give it a little more personality, but the problem is we can't see karen, we can't see the rest of the building, so let's adds other light sources to try to illuminate the rest of the image so I could go over here decided I want a spotlight maybe I want to just point a flashlight. Reddick, karen and lighter up um let's try here's a spotlight now with the spotlight, we have a bunch of different controls here and here I can move it around, you'll see it illuminating things and actually it's weird that I can't get it to be out there now it's out here that's kind of odd. Did you not see it being black in here until I moved and moved it back? Not sure why that wass because usually it would illuminate something. Point it right at karen. So think about this is being the direction that this's being pointed at this oval the inner oval is the surface it's falling on? You know how when you point a flashlight, you can see where the beam hit something. Well, right there is where the beam hit something. We have the same little intensity dial around this so I can write it up. We're darken it up and then I confined tune its pattern by pulling on these little size to see how wide of it beam is it? How overall is this thing? Maybe I'll angle it over this way and then reposition it more like that. I can also control its color on the right side there's that same choice called color and there's. This choice called hot spot in hot spot is just controlling how big that little inner oval is and that's the same thing it's just going over here in pulling on it here. When I let go, it just updates the number so it's up to you if you want to do it manually by dragging or we're not, uh then I might add another light source because there's a third kind we haven't used yet, so we've used a spotlight to get a flashlight point met karen, we've used the point light to add our little red light up there now, it's at an infinite light, a light that's infinitely far away, similar to the sun. And with that it's hard to see, because how dark the images right now, but for some reason photoshopped, this doesn't seem to want to turn the light on until I touch it. So, uh, but do you see that circle in the upper right of my screen? That's the origin of the light source, like the sun is over there, and if you were to draw a line from the sun it's just showing you a little ball here to say, this is where the sun's coming down in this little kind of thing that's sticking up is also an indicator. What direction is a son away and that's? Just something I could grab and move around to say now the sun's coming from the upper left, the sun's coming from, I don't know some other planet in the ground, that kind of thing, and I might just get it, so it looks like the sun is somewhere up that direction now with that we have the normal little dial sometimes it's hard to grab the dial though because I have another light source pointing at karen there with a flashlight one and if I try to grab this little dial sometimes it'll let me and other times it will think I want to click on the other light source so if you ever find it to be difficult that's why we have the controls over on the right is sometimes when you click it thinks so I wanted to grab a different light source so here I can adjust my my intensity who are here or the the color now it's looking pretty bad because there are all these blobs on top of karen's head and they represent those various light sources remember you can type command h to end up hiding all those and we're getting there but I think the flashlight that I have pointed at her is a bit too much so in my list over here it list everything of added the top most one is the first one I added it just built him up if I want to go back and edit any one of the others I could just click on it and the one we have a pointing that karen was a spotlight but not so I just click right here on this then I'm going to see the settings for that particular light and I could maybe bring the intensity down a bit more like that you think or if I want to see if I really need that light source at all I can just turn off the eyeball next to the word spotlight so if I turned that off there's without the spotlight turn it back on theirs with so I think I needed it just might be that I want to find tune it by bringing down my intensity a little bit and I could adjust the size of the hot spot so I needed to be a wider hot spot or a narrower one and if I really want to find tune and I could start adding more light sources so I can add a light source for our feet or something like that if I really wanted to illuminate it ah then we also can control the feeling of the surface that this stuff is lighting is it lighting something that is a dull surface that's like got a matte finish to it or is it something that's polished if it's polished then when you point a light at the light's going to reflect off of it it's going to probably get like a speculum highlight or something similar whereas if it's a dull finish it's got like a texture on the finish it's not going to create the speculum highlight is much it's not like a chrome bumper where it's going bounce right off so we have that here with gloss and metallic if I bring gloss up you'll notice that the light source is air going to have more of a tendency of creating like, blown out areas on the picture, because it's like reflecting off of that, I'm going to keep that down because it's not a glassy surface it's brick, uh, metallic. I'm not as good at it, but it does something similar when it comes to, uh, doing the highlights, I'm not as good as thinking mentally about how it's affecting things, and then we haven't overall, if the image overall is to brighter to dark, this is gonna influence all our light sources. I wanted to look like it's a little bit dark out it's going to be all rainy and all that we can do this now if you want to do before and after the previous check box at the top, if I turn off pretty checkbox there's our original turn it back on, you see how now it looks like that little light up top is more influential in the scene, and karen sticking out a little bit more, uh, with that, and if this is something I think I'd want to use again, which I don't think I would, because it's very specific to where things are positioned in the image, just know that you could come up here and say, save that as a preset but meantime, I would do that is what I'm doing something the overall picture is something that could be usable in lots of different images with this with the light sources you couldn't remember even trough the eyeball on each one to see how it's contributing so here's no light whatsoever so everything's dark could turn on our infinite light just for an overall spotlight on karen and our little point light up there, switch between them by just clicking on them and you can change the settings above. And if you want to get rid of any of these, just click on it and there's a trash can uh in the lower right and you can add up more and more lights to build up in effect if I click okay, as long as I applied this too smart object instead of to a normal layer, then it's just gonna be an accessory to the layer that's there, and if I double click on the words lighting effects, it'll pop back in here and let me see the settings so I can modify it and there are just a couple other settings. If you have a bigger screen my screen, I have to scroll down here there's, ambience and texture, we're going to apply texture on a different picture, it would be pretty cool we dio because it will what texture does is it treats the photograph is if it's not flat it means it thinks it's three dimensional in some way and that's going to allow us teo light things that we make ourselves I'm gonna make a button look a campaign button for a politician kind of thing I'm going to make it from scratch and in the end I wanted to look like it has a light source on it oh I mean I want to try to make it look like a chinese I'll turn up the glass we might get a little speculum highlight on it and all that but it's going to know it's three dimensional instead of being flat so it's gonna have highlights and shadows because of that so general questions about lighting effects except for the setting called texture which we have not used yet sampler asks do you feel like using light sources is a yields better results than using adjustment layer with a mask? It depends on what I'm trying to accomplish sometimes it's hard for me to visualize what would it look like for me to add something in particular area much easier for me to think of just throwing light from a particular direction? So it really depends and on some things you could do it with either one where it's just a personal preference uh so the main thing though is for me when I want to control what the surfaces like it's a surface shiny versus something else I like having those controls within this and so sometimes lighting effects is my preference. One more question from never say die, does the order of the effects matter? Could you rearrange the list and will it change the effect on the image? Um, I don't know for certain there, but in that I haven't experimented, but I don't think it's gonna matter because it's a matter it's just like light in a in the real life in a matter of does it matter if I turn on a flashlight first, who are turned on a lightbulb over here? First in the end, the tour just combining together. So as far as I know, it doesn't matter, but I haven't extensively tested it to be absolutely sure. So in here we have added our lighting effects, and once I clicked, okay, and we're back to this, then I also turn my reign back on so here's without the rain there's with the right. So then let's, look at just the original picture will turn my rain off and turn off my fart smart filters, and we just have a plain old iphone photo you could say, uh, changing light, though putting a little bit rain in makes it a little bit more interesting.

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Ratings and Reviews

Kathleen
 

This is the second class on PS filters that I've taken with Ben Willmore. He is handsdown a fabulous teacher and one I highly recommend. I purchased both classes and I feel that for the price, they are worth their weight in gold. I applied his PS filter techniques to some of my surface pattern designs that were created using my original artwork and I've received great comments. So I owe a great deal of gratitude to CL and to Ben Wilmore for giving me the opportunity to grow my PS knowledge and to apply it with confidence to my artwork. Thank you!

a Creativelive Student
 

well I would recommend it sort of. I think much of the chapters show you how to use things without giving good examples or reasons such as with the brushes part. The photo on the cover is never worked on or really any of the topics didn't talk about how to achieve that look. I did learn some things as I have a lot to learn. I have been using the textures with great success. He does a nice job of explaining...I just don;t think we saw enough start to finish work.

a Creativelive Student
 

Fantastic tutor and course content! Ben Willmore truly is a master of Photoshop and has the ability to teach all aspects of Photoshop in such and easy-to-understand manner. Thanks so much for making Photoshop so much more understandable. Highly recommended.

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