Photoshop Can Now Move the Light in Your Photo

Flat window light or a harsh shadow across a face used to mean a reshoot or an evening of dodging and burning. Photoshop's new Relight feature, currently in the beta, lets you reposition, soften, and recolor the light in a finished image with a handful of sliders.

Jesús Ramirez of Photoshop Training Channel spent more than 1,500 generative credits learning Relight, and he starts with a plain portrait to show how each control behaves. You create a Relight layer from the Layers panel flyout menu or the Layer menu, and Photoshop hides your original and builds a new layer from its contents. Dragging the Original lighting slider to 0% strips out the existing light, so only the virtual light shapes the scene. From there, Intensity sets brightness, Diffusion sets the size of the source, and dragging the light icon across the canvas moves highlights and shadows across the face in a way that looks like actual relighting. The Close/Far slider pushes the light toward the camera or behind the subject, and that second option gives you a backlit look with a rim along one edge.

The credit system shapes how you work with all of this. Everything you see while adjusting is a deliberately low-resolution preview, and it costs nothing. Clicking Done renders the final version at your document size and uses 30 credits, and going back to edit the lights and clicking Done again costs another 30. Pressing Escape and discarding is free. The final render can also look different from the preview, so Ramirez recommends judging the result only after it renders, which means you want your choices settled before you commit. He also points out a quirk with the reset button and the one global slider that can make a light seem to vanish for no obvious reason.

A room shot is where the feature surprised him. Using two versions of the same interior, one with a window and one without, he drops Original lighting and Intensity to zero on both. The windowless room goes dark. The room with the window stays partly lit, because Relight treats a visible light source as part of the scene it is recreating. Adobe calls what's left the remaining ambient light. The tradeoff runs the other way too: Relight can dim everything the window was lighting, but it won't switch off a source it can see.

The Diffusion slider follows the same rule as a softbox on set. Shadow softness depends on how large the light is relative to the subject, so a big octabox placed close wraps light around a face, while the same box pulled across the room starts throwing harder shadows. The default 5,500 K setting sits right around the color of daylight and most flash output, and moving a light behind your subject creates a rim for the same reason a hair light does in a studio. If you already think in those terms, you can get to a believable result in fewer renders, and fewer renders mean fewer credits spent. It works in reverse as well. Relight's free preview mode is a cheap way to sketch a lighting setup before you rent gear or book a studio, since you can test a rim light or a colored gel on a similar image and see roughly how it falls. Adobe has been charging generative credits for features like Generative Fill for a while now, and Relight adds to the case for doing your thinking up front and your clicking last.

Not every image cooperates. On a landscape with the original light removed, the result looks more like someone aiming a flashlight at the scene than like sunlight, and raising Diffusion doesn't change that much. Relight does its best work with a clearly defined subject, such as a person or an interior. Composites bring a different snag, since Relight only looks at the active layer. When Ramirez tries it on a layered city scene, the effect lands on a single jacket instead of the whole image, so he shows a workaround before lighting a figure with red neon from a sign and adding a cyan rim to separate him from the background. He also tests resolution. Adobe says the final render matches your input image's pixel dimensions, but at 100%, fine hair and texture in the Relight layer look softer than in the original. Adobe's announcement uses the word "upscale," which points to the image being generated smaller and then enlarged to your document size.

The full neon composite, including the fix for light spilling onto the background and the quick sharpness test, is in the video above.