Tutorial Tuesday: Adding a Lens Flare
I love some of the filters you can use in photoshop (and elements!) to quickly pop a nice little effect onto your photo. Today I’m showing you a quick and easy Lens Flare effect! (images open larger in new windows when you click on them!)
Open your photo, create a new layer
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Go to Edit > Fill and choose Black from the contents dropdown. Click ok.
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Change the blend mode to Screen
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If you are using PS, you can right click on the black layer and click on Convert to Smart Object to do the next few steps non-destructively. PSE users cannot edit smart objects, so it doesn’t do much good to do this in PSE (sorry gals…)
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Now go to Filter > Render > Lens Flare
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You should be looking at something like this, whether you’re using PS or PSE:
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You can click on the little plus icon to move the main part of the flare to where you want it on your photo (also, I just leave the Lens Type at 50-300mm Zoom – you can play with this setting if you’d like)
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You can also make the flare brighter (bigger) or darker (smaller) by moving the slider. When you’re done, click ok.
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If you don’t like where the main flair ended up or the brightness, you can hit CTRL-Z and try again. If you created a smart object in PS, you can just double click the Lens Flare in the layer palette
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If the little flares are to “hard” or “sharp” for you taste like these are:
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You can go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur:
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and move the slider to adjust until you’re happy with the result:
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Here’s my before and after for this photo:
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And one I did in PSE:
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Pretty cool, eh? And how quick and easy was that??
I hope you enjoyed today’s tutorial, and if there’s anything you need help with or want a tutorial about, let us know!
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