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Hi there! In this videio I'm gonna switch the light on and show you how to convert a picture like that:
Into a picture like that
Well, I often see that people like to do one thing: They just select the area they want to have their light beam on
- Something like that - And then they fill it with white, which is ok. -so far
But what they do now is they add a gausian blur to it.
And what this does is it has the same blur at the edges or your lightbeam
And a natural lightbeam ... Well physics has it that a natural light beam is actually more or less sharp at the beguinning and difuse at the end.
So you'd need another technique. This might look ok and it might work for smaller areas
where you don't need to see as much detail but in our picture since it is at the centre of our picture we gonna use another technique.
The first thing I am going to do is to go to my chanels and by pressing control I click on the RGB chanel.
This gives you a selection of the light areas of your picture. And what I need to do now is to adjust that selection and give it a bit more contrast.
Just like that. Just a bit. And what I also do is I smoothe the edges a bit. - Something like that -
Now, I just need the parts where really light could come out. So I switch to mask mode and I erase
those parts where it is physically impossible to have light comming from.
Now, once I've got that I need to create a new layer and then I fill it with white. And what I do now is I apply a certain filter: I go to radial filter
and then I use the zoom rays. And the strengh - I'd say not more then twelve here - Make sure you hit the last option here to give you the best quality.
Now the result should look something like this. And now you need to mask those areas where your light rays could not come from.
That would be for instance in here. Because this pillar would actually be in front of it.
Well the next thing we need to do is our light beam. Therefore I use the selection tool here. And I just select the part where my light beam should be.
Then I use the substraction mode to simply get rid of certain areas to create the actual rays.
Well lets say that's enough. I switch into mask mode again and here again I need to apply a radial blur filter. Only that this time I use the circular option.
And the intensity should not be more than seven.
There you are! There is your light ray.
Then add a levels layer and then you reduce the black areas. And there is when the light starts to float into your picture. Just like that!
All right :-) Since the other windows also need some light rays we do the simpliest thing and copy that one and drag it where I need it.
Let's say over here.
And again I need to erase those areas where the light would not come from.
As light always comes with a certain colour tone I'd recommend to add a photo filter.
In order to simulate this quality and intensity. Make sure it is a warm filter.
- Or - You could also use a cold filter :-s but this would not correspont to the admosphere of my picture here.
And here we go. Ligh on, light off. I hope that was a bit of a help for you and you enjoyed the video.