How to Create Interesting Lighting Effects Using Photoshop

Sometimes, depending on your shooting environment, you might not be left with ideal lighting. This fun and educational video tutorial will show you some clever techniques to augment existing lighting to make the scene a bit more cinematic by using Photoshop.

Coming to you from Aaron Nace with Phlearn, this excellent video will show you how to augment existing lighting in a scene to give it a more cinematic glow that can add a lot of visual interest to a photo. The technique relies on some clever masking techniques so you don't have to spend an inordinate amount of time carefully selecting light sources in your image. From there, you'll learn how to make the light sources stronger and add some color toning to change the atmosphere of the photo, finally using a clever blurring technique on the layer mask itself to add a bit of a realistic glow. It's a pretty simple but clever technique that's a lot of fun to play with; just be careful not to go too over the top with it, as it can quickly become a bit gaudy if it's overdone. Check out the video above for the full rundown. 

Alex Cooke's picture

Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

Log in or register to post comments
2 Comments

There are some ways to improve this. I would develop a separate raw just for the mask to be able to use the much greater dynamic range and a cleaner result. I would also do the glow on the mask with a layer style as that lets you control the fallow with a curve, giving more realistic results.

Nice!! Thanks for sharing