Is Photoshop's New Relight Tool Worth 30 Credits?

Photoshop's new Relight feature lets you move the light falling on a subject after the shot is already taken, a job that used to mean hours of dodging, burning, and hand-painted highlights. If you build composites or shoot people and products in flat light, a tool that reshapes direction and warmth in a few clicks could shift how much you fix in post versus on set.

Each Relight costs 30 generative credits. Aaron Nace of PHLEARN puts that price to the test with a composite of a hiker photographed under cloudy skies and dropped onto a sunlit rock. The tool works one layer at a time, so you cut out your subject first, then create a new Relight layer from the Layer menu, which duplicates whatever layer you have selected. For now, it lives only in the Photoshop beta. Once the lighting preview loads, you get a light icon you can drag anywhere in the frame, plus controls for color temperature, position, distance, and more. Nace warms the light to 3,200 K to match the scene, then drags the icon directly instead of working the position sliders, which move on their own as you go.

The close-versus-far slider does most of the heavy lifting. Pushing it from close to the camera toward far swings the light past the subject and around to the other side, and setting it all the way to far mimics a source as distant as the sun. From there, intensity, diffusion, and a control for how much of the original lighting survives let you blend the new light with what was already in the frame. Nace suggests raising diffusion in small steps and checking each one, since it can turn too soft quickly. You can stack up to three lights, and the tool works on single images as well as composites. It's built for defined subjects like people and products, so landscapes and backgrounds are off the table.

On a real set, distance controls how light falls off across a subject. Under the inverse square law, a light's intensity drops with the square of its distance, so a strobe a couple of feet from a face gets visibly dimmer from nose to ear. Sunlight looks even across an entire body because the sun sits about 93 million miles away, and a few feet of difference is meaningless at that scale. Before touching any slider, study your background plate and answer three questions: where the light comes from, how warm it is, and how hard its shadows are. Crisp shadows on rocks call for low diffusion on your subject, while soft, wrapping shadows under an overcast sky call for more. Training your eye on those cues pays off whether you use Relight, Harmonize, or painted dodge and burn layers, and it carries back into the field, where you can shoot subject plates with the light already pointing the way the final scene needs.

Resolution is where the tool runs into trouble. Clicking Done spends the 30 credits and bakes the lighting into a higher-resolution version of the layer, yet zooming in shows it falls well short of the original file. Nace then runs Harmonize, an older Photoshop feature built specifically for composites that costs five credits, adds a shadow under the subject, and offers three variations to pick from. Comparing all three layers up close, Harmonize lands sharper than Relight, while neither matches the original. Every time you reopen the lighting controls and hit Done again, another 30 credits disappear, so trial and error gets expensive fast. Nace works around that with a specific blend mode and layer order that keep the new light, bring back the original detail, and let you dial the effect up or down with nothing more than the layer's opacity slider.

The full composite, start to finish, is in the video above.