Lessons

Lesson Info

Vignettes and Lighting Effects

we're going to talk about it and yet I'm going to get rid of these adjustment layers that I just created now I'm going to show you first how I tend to do a just how I tend to do been yet it's so the way that I tend to do them is to draw them and just really really simple just making a selection wherever I think it should be darker and then running with that so the way that I would do it is with my lasso tool and once I'm on my last o'toole as you know I have free rein to do whatever I want I can make whatever shapes I want and that is totally fine so when I'm on my last so I'm thinking to myself I want to maintain this area of the image and with a lot of ways of making vignettes it would naturally just cover that up with darkness if it's going to cover that with darkness than we've lost our motivated light we need a new way of finding light in this image so I'm just going to not touch it I don't want it to become darker so one way of doing this is to start to select the areas where I t...

hink it could be darker just by selecting like this making a big selection because I think maybe these three corners could benefit a little bit from being a bit darker that way this light stands out more and that's something to think about when you are creating vignettes is that it's not just about what needs to be darker but also what needs to be brighter so if you're creating a vignette over here then the eye is going to be tricked into thinking that this got brighter even though it didn't so if maybe you're thinking that some part of your image is too bright but it may be some things blown out yet somewhere in that area needs to be brighter and you could just make some area darker and then it will add more light essentially to that space so once I've made the selection if I were to just leave that as it is then what we would have is if I go into my curves adjustment is a really really hard edge now that's not anywhere near avignon like we want so there a couple of ways that you can take care of that one if you just you don't like feathering which I would totally understand you could leave it okay believe it maybe we don't go to print like that maybe we fix it so let's fix it with the uh layer mask here so I'm going to click on my brush tool I'm gonna make that size a lot bigger and now we're just going to lay her mask on black here and I'm gonna take that opacity up to one hundred percent so then we're totally erasing this edge of arvin yet so now I can go in and lightly erase that then yet there just like this okay and now it's too dark on the edges so now we can lower the opacity there so that's one way of doing it you don't always have to feather everything or go in to refine edge and make that edge soft before really being able to see what it is you can always just erase whenever you feel like a racing create hard edges and then adjust your brush to take care of those hard edges now the other way that I might do this without even drawing anything is too very simply create a new curves adjustment layer make everything darker they all write to that and then go in with my layer mask and a brush here so maybe I'll take the opacity down on this because we don't have a hard edge to completely get rid of so I'm going in at a lower opacity on my brush that way I can now start to a race where I might not want that um that darkness to be if I right click that again will bring up size and hardness so that's another way just to double check your hardness make sure that it's down to zero percent because once you take the hardness up on your brush well then new miners will have a hard edge of a selection because it's going to do that and we don't want that to happen we want a nice soft transition so instead I will go in zero percent hardness and I can start to a race where we might want a little bit more light just sort of peeking in there and always again you can adjust the opacity so that's a couple of ways that I would do it if I were actually sitting at home and I were actually going through this process then I would do it with feathering so very quickly with that selection tool the lasso tool I would draw in wherever I felt it needed to be darker just like that I would right click and I would either choose feather or refine edge so we talked about this yesterday now you can choose feather right here and you could just type in your pixels there you can choose refine edge from right here you don't always have to right click I just in the habit of right clicking so I get all of my selections but you can choose either one so if we choose refine edge again we get that feather slider weaken take that feather slider up quite a lot for however much we want so we'll try that say ok and now we can go ahead with our curve and make that area darker so that's how I tend to do it I recognize that that creates like kind of an extra step that you might not want to do so anyway you prefer but there are some ways of doing this that don't require drawing and guessing it where you want the vignette to be and stuff like that and so a couple of ways we're going to go into filter once I'm actually clicked on a layer that would be very helpful we're going to go into filter and we're going to find render and then we're going to go in tow lighting effects now I find lighting effects to be very fun I think that it's a really interesting way of working in photoshopped although it could be a little bit tedious is sometimes with some of these different settings that you can go through and stuff like that okay so let's go ahead and we're on spot right now we have spot point and infinite now I'm not well versed in infinite yet I've been playing with it a little bit and we'll play with that last just so we do go through it yeah but with spot let's just take a look at what's happening here so I'm gonna go out and just start playing with this and see what's going on we can rotate it okay and then we can start to play with hot spot and what the white is doing now actually I'm gonna go I'm gonna exit out of this real quick because I'm going to click my top player just that weaken more clearly see what effect this is having here so let's do this on this top layer just so everybody can see a little bit clearer so filter render lighting effects okay now we can really see what's happening there because that was just affecting our cloud layer so what it's doing is it's giving a spotlight so for thinking about lighting then you can just put any one of these words in front of the word light and that's going to tell you what it does so spot light we all know what that is it is a spot of light that shines on somebody okay so we have a spotlight now you can see when I hover here on this little dot it's has rotate so if I click that I can then rotate and then change where it's going okay so now maybe I want teo move this so whenever you see the word move when you're hovering you can see it kind of goes scale wit so I can move the scale if I hover again common why are you there move move and then I can continue to rotate or move or scale so those are all the different options that we have their and can always just increase the intensity by moving this little circle slider and so we have a lot of options just within this sort of what it gives us automatically but then you can play with color and the intensity of that color and hot spot if you want that to be a little bit less or a little bit more you khun sort of move that in and out in and out so we have all of these different options now gloss I never really gets it never does anything to my pictures but it just makes things blown out so I don't tend to play with that but I have all of these different sliders and it's something you can play with now ambiance is my favorite because that allows mohr to be affected and that really helps me because I have a hard time playing with thes circles I tend to like lose my my drag their eso ambience is a really nice one so then it's not so intense not so harsh but let me tell you how I would work with lighting effects because I do find it to be a little bit tricky to make subtle changes and lighting effects so if this was what I wanted let's just say I'll say ok and now we have this crazy lighting effect and the reason why I would say okay to that is because I would have made a duplicate layer that way I can now erase that layer and let the bottom show through so let's go through this one more time I could step back in our history we're going to go right up to the top here with you saturation layer and I'm going to duplicate that layer by dragging it on top of the page forthe icon so now that layer is duplicated exactly so now when I go into filter render lighting effects then we have it sort of exactly what it was before settings air saved there so I'll say okay but now I can lower the opacity on that layer if I thought it was too much I can go ahead and create a layer mask and I can choose my brush tool and I can erase it from here if it's too bright so maybe I'll do some erasing in this portion but maybe I like it everywhere else and so now we have drastically changed the lighting effect there we've created this spotlight effect at an angle on our subject and we're racing it where it's too much or where you don't like it so I love playing with lighting effects like that but let's go ahead and undo that layer will make another duplicate copy and let's see what else lighting effects khun d'oh so when we go into filter render lighting effects well then we can go ahead and change from spotlight to point light and so that all of this is laid out in that packet you have so when we go to point light it is literally telling you where your point of light so you can move that point of light wherever you want you can see what it's kind of doing when I make it glow all around this could be a really fun option for things like lighting away in turn or something like that it gives kind of a glowing effect so that's kind of fun to play with especially I mean like this actually goes back to that the person who said about making light glow from inside that could be kind of cool for this because it would allow that to happen so when I click on this outside circle common among scale when you hover and it's a scale you can then change the scale of the white so you could make it much smaller you could make it much bigger and this inside circle is always going to give you intensity so you can always pull that back or make it as intense as you want so I'm going to pull it back and maybe we just want the light coming from right up here maybe we'll make the scale a little bit bigger knowing that we can fix this leader or we can play with our sliders so if we're starting to play with our sliders thie intensity slider there we can just take that down a little bit and I actually think that looks kind of nice so let's go with that we'll say okay all right and now we still have our layer preserved below so all we've done is just adam a little little hint of light the point light there so the point of light is now in this little circle it's affecting our subject just a little bit then of course we can get rid of it all we want with capacity and creating a layer mask so the last one that I'm going to talk about there after I create my layer again I'm just duplicating that layer we can go in now again to filter render lighting effects and once we're in here we can now play with infinite I am not very good with infinite yet so I just want to go over it really briefly but it's kind of awesome it's like let's say that you have a scene and you're going to light that scene with a light and you want the light to be raking in across the subject this allows you to do that it allows for raking light basically it creates more of a three d effect so what you're looking at right now with this circle is sort of like okay so imagine that you're the subject and this is the light and it's shining right at you you're just looking at this circular light that's what this is it's applying that white evenly over the whole picture but let's say that your light looks like this it's kind of a dome circle on the front you have that light and when you start to move the light like this then you start to see the edge of that dome and you can see the back of the white and that's what this is about to dio so when we click this you can see that it's turning the white for you so it's showing you where the white will be directed within the picture so that's kind of a fun thing that I think is probably new word to photo shop I hadn't noticed it before when I would play with lighting effects arrives just oblivious either one on dh so you can make that light come from wherever you want now I'm sure you can also move this but I'm very bad with this one and I have a hard time like getting it in the right spot but if I played with it long enough let's see infinite love not you not you while one of them moves it and I'll show you later if I can figure it out which one so I can move my light wherever I want make it rake across the image obviously a really great thing and this again always has that intensity on the inside circle okay so if we say okay to that you can see what it's doing which we did it very subtly but it's wreaking the weight a little bit more all right so now we're going to do one more thing here for a vignette and think that I want to do is go into filter and I'm going to find lens correction which is right here in the top portion of the image so lens correction now lens correction is one of those things were on kind of met because it's a little bit too symmetrical for me so I'm going into custom here when I go into custom that I have all sorts of fun things that I can play with but the one that we're looking at has been yet so when I go into a lens correction and then I go to vignette a lot of wen's correction here is actually made to stop the video thing that happens with your lens which is a common problem with lenses but you can also create a vignette by moving the slider so when I move the vignette down the vineyard slider down for the amount you can change the amount of how much you are creating I can change the midpoint so that's just pulling it out towards the edges more or in toward the subject a little bit more and then we can also do the opposite so here we can create more lighting effects by adding brightness to the outside edges if that's something that we desire so this is all something that I think can create really awesome effects and I kind of like this in that it's easier to understand because it's just a slider and I like sliders I don't know about you guys but I think they're very awesome because then I get it's you can only go one way or the other way where has that infinite lighting is like boggling my mind but let's see so I'm going to just go ahead and do my vignette here maybe will make it attack or subject a little bit more and when we do that we can always just you know again create a layer mask on that to be able to get rid of it where we don't want it and so on that's something that's always very very nice to have an option to d'oh okay so let's get rid of that but now I did talk about some other lighting effects things that in my opinion are goingto really really change how we read an image so one of those things is teo again add clouds so let's go back and talk about that but I did promise that we would get to that