How To Achieve Realistic Lighting Effects In Photoshop For Digital Art

How To Achieve Realistic Lighting Effects In Photoshop For Digital Art – Follow along as we show you how to create realistic glows and lighting effects in Photoshop! Learn how to create a light ring effect, integrate it into your photos, use the included Photoshop brushes to add particle effects, and much more!

We’d love to see what you create using the techniques discussed in this tutorial! Send us your custom light effect for a chance to be featured on this page and social media.

How To Achieve Realistic Lighting Effects In Photoshop For Digital Art

Use the image included in the tutorial download, a free stock image from Pexels.com or Unsplash.com, or an image you own the rights to (make sure it’s family-friendly!).

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Creating special effects in Photoshop is a lot of fun and can produce some truly stunning images. The best thing about glow effects, like the ones we created in this tutorial, is that they can be added to almost any photo.

Take a look at the image we used in the example. This is a simple, well-composed portrait of a woman who practices yoga and meditation. We can’t use a lighting effect to liven things up a bit, right?

Since we want the glow effect, we know that we will add a light source to the image. If you want a new light source to emerge, it’s normal to darken the rest of the photo.

Create a Levels adjustment layer, place it over the background image in the layer stack, and drag the Highlight Output Layers slider to the left.

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This reduces the overall brightness of the image, ultimately helping to improve the glow effect. This will also give us the opportunity to add more ambient light around the subject to enhance the overall effect.

Our goal for this image was to create a bright ring of energy around the subject in the photo. So we need a ring to get started.

To create a donut shape, take the Ellipse Tool and click and drag around your subject while holding down Shift to maintain a perfect circle. Make sure that Fill is set to None and Stroke is set to the color you want for the glow effect (you can always change this later).

Once the circle is created, you can use the Move tool to adjust its position or use the Transform options to resize it as needed.

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It is always a good practice to leave a reference to any original resource you create. Once you’re happy with the color and position of the circle, duplicate it. Right-click on the copy and select Rasterize Layer. This will be the layer on which we will start creating effects.

Go ahead and hide the original shape layer, we’ll keep it for later use.

Now that we have the base of the light ring, we’ll duplicate this layer, adding a combination of blur and blending modes to create the effect.

Don’t worry about it being too strong at first. We will repeat this process again and again, increasing the intensity of the blur with each step.

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To add some natural variation to the glow effect, create a layer mask on each layer of the ring and paint black in random spots using a large, soft brush set to low flow. It’s very subtle but makes the overall effect more natural.

As you continue adding new ring layers with different levels of blur, try changing the blending mode of each layer. We found the screen to produce nice, soft lighting effects, so it should be your first choice.

However, you can experiment with other people and see what happens. We found that setting a layer to Dissolve blending mode created a cool particle effect that we could add later.

When using a non-specific blending mode like Fade, it is often useful to transfer the effect to a new layer, which we can set to normal blending mode.

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To replicate the effect of the Dissolve blending mode, we simply need a way to select all the particles it creates. Place a solid black fill layer behind the decomposition layer.

Then use Select Color Range to select a color for the glow effect. With the selection active, create a new layer and fill the selection with the same color you used to create the glowing ring.

You will have a new layer with a copy of the Dissolve Blending Mode effect. Go ahead and delete the original layer we set to Dissolve Blending Mode – it’s no longer needed.

Just like we did with the other light ring layers, continue adding a Gaussian blur to the fade effect to help it blend more naturally into the image.

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Go ahead and duplicate the layer (or the entire group) and use the blur and blend modes to bring out the glow effect you like.

Now that our light ring is almost complete, let’s integrate it into the photo so that it appears behind the subject.

We want the ring to be invisible everywhere from the upper body. To do this, we can create and use a selection of themes to hide these areas of the ring.

Group all the layers of the light ring and hide the group. Zoom in a little on the topic and go to “Selection” and then “Color Range.” Select the black from the subject’s clothing and adjust it until you have a clear selection of the subject.

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Now make the light ring group visible and load the active subject selection into the group’s layer mask. You should see something like this:

The selection looks good, but it’s the opposite of what we want. Invert the newly created layer mask by pressing CTRL or CMD + I.

We have a really cool light ring that appears to float behind the subject. However, if we want the photo to look more realistic, we need to include the ring glow in the photo’s lighting.

This requires a little manual work using the brush tool, but it’s worth it! Zoom in on the image and begin to lightly trace the edges of the object using the bright colors taken from the light ring. The goal is to create some colorful highlights around it, making it look like the ring light is enveloping the subject.

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Spend a little extra time when working on detailed areas like hair. The more subtle, natural highlights you add, the better the overall effect will be.

You can spend as much time as you want on this part, but the more you spend, the more real everything will seem.

After completing the small edge details, we can add some larger soft lighting effects around the subject. Again, use a large, soft brush and low flow to paint large blobs on the edges of the subject.

Then, use Blend If to ensure that these highlights only appear in places in the image where there are natural highlights.

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Our work is almost complete. We did a good job integrating effects and lighting around the subject, but we needed to pay more attention to the environment and the rest of the background. It makes sense that the light ring would create some reflection and light on the ground around the subject.

To do this, simply copy the entire group of light rings, then edit and rearrange it until it fits the natural area along the ground.

Then use the Brush Tool to paint black on the layer mask to make the effect more subtle.

Customizing Photoshop brushes is a great way to enhance special effects. In particular, custom brushes are the best way to create particle and atmospheric effects because we can create randomness and natural variations in the brush itself.

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You can follow the video to learn how we create a custom brush, but if you want to skip this process, the brush tutorial is available for free download.

Now that we’ve created most of the effects, we can zoom out and look at the image as a whole. Here we can decide if we want the brightness to be more or less intense and adjust it accordingly.

You can add a Gaussian blur to the new duplicate layer, change the blending mode, and use layer masks to add some intensity variation at different points in the image.

When you’re done, you should have a natural-looking glow that takes your original photo somewhere new and awesome!

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But it doesn’t end here! Whether you’re creating special effects or combining multiple images, adding a little color grading to everything can really help keep it all together.

To add quick and effective color grading, try using the Color Balance adjustment layer to push and pull the colors in your image until you get the look you want. You can add light and sunbeam effects

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