Create realistic sun rays in Photoshop

hey there today I have something really quick and easy to do in Photoshop I want to show you how to create fake sunrays and Photoshop taking pictures of a picture like this for example where you can see the sunrays is not exactly the most the easiest task especially for beginners because shooting against the Sun is not easy and it usually involves taking multiple exposures so assuming you have a single photo like the one that I have here and you want to add sun rays to it I want to show you how to do it it's really easy I'm going to open my stock image that I want to stock image that I used this is an image that I took myself yesterday actually and it looks like this I just made some basic edits in Camera Raw I'm going to give you the edited photo so you have it it's free you can you can get it from my website on the video description you'll find the link to it and we're gonna stop working with this now the first thing we want to do is create a new layer and name it rays and you can make this non-destructively and actually we're gonna make it partially non-destructive we're gonna use a gradient we're going to add a gradient adjustment and here I'm going to click on the gradient to open the editor and where it says gradient type we're going to change the solid to noise and you can see that we have some colors here and if you click here on randomize you get different color variations now we want to increase the roughness to 100 and the only thing that we want to have here is black and white so we can see better the distribution of the of the light and dark so I'm going to change the RGB color model to lab and I'm going to move these sliders towards the center the a and the B this one as well over here like that okay and now we can see a lot better blacks and whites and now we can click randomize and what we want to have is a more or less even distribution like this and maybe even this is too much white so you can add restrict colors or not depending on what you want to have I want to decide the activate add transparency I'm going to leave it like this maybe it's too much maybe we'll get too much Sun too many sun rays but we'll see now now I'm going to change the style to angle and I'm going to click OK for now because I want to change the blend mode to screen so I can see where I put this and now if you want to move this you have to double click on the adjustment to open the small panel and now we can move this wherever you want and I'm going to move the angle and probably open the gradient editor again and choose randomize again until I get something that I like the distribution of the race is very important because it allows you to create more realistic sun rays and look like I have too much too much white there so I'm going to still click the randomize until I get something that I like I'm going to leave it like this click OK and maybe move the angle and see what I get I think it's ok I'm gonna leave it like that for for the tutorial and it will work I want to get something pretty much even if possible but I'm going to leave it like this and click OK now I'm going to turn this into a smart object because I want to soften this I'm going to go to filter blur and choose Gaussian blur here and the amount of blurring that you use really depend on the race that you have how thin they are the distribution how big your canvas is and that kind of thing so I'm going to leave it to 40 and I'm gonna leave it like that and now I'm going to add a hue saturation on top and I'm going to clip it by pressing alt and putting the mouse between the two layers and click this will only affect the race now and I'm gonna check the colorize option and have I want to have a yellowish tone for this like that and now I'm going to add a curves adjustment on top again clipped and with this you can darken parts of it and maybe recover the those parts there on the shadows and the mid-tones you don't want to have this sort of color and problem here although it could look nice maybe even a bit more realistic like splitting the light into different colors but I don't want to have it that visible like so maybe and here on the hue/saturation you can also work with the lightness if you move this to the left the lightness slider you can darken the effect a bit and that's pretty much it it's not looking very realistic so I could probably open this and probably change the distribution to something like this yeah it looks a bit more yeah a lot better see that's why I like working on destructively now I'm going to save because I open this PSB file the smart object and now you can see that this looks a lot better once it updated the smart object I'm going to drag this lower a bit and something like that I'm gonna leave it there now I'm going to create a layer mask and I want to use a regular well black to white using the radial type and just fade away the effect like that I'm starting here this is the map that I have so as I go away from the starting point the array start to fade out like that and maybe with a hue/saturation probably saturate this a bit more and something like that and you're pretty much done you can also create a glow of light on a new layer set on screen with the brush tool let's sample a color from the image something like that and just put a glow of light over there even so I think the Rays are too strong so I'm going to move this lightness slider a bit more towards the left and you can see a less-is-more so don't overdo the settings you just want to have a few rays there and you don't want to overdo this and then you can use I don't know maybe a color lookup to UM add some color to your image I'm going to use the hue blend mode and do something like that or maybe some curves to create a split tone effect like that maybe using this S curve like so and we're done let me show you the original image and with the sunrays original and with the sunrays so that's it that's how you can create sunrays in Photoshop as you can see it's not very difficult I hope you enjoyed the tutorial and if you want to post your images use the hashtag PSD box on Instagram or Facebook and that's all for today I'm Andre from PSD box and we'll see you on the next tutorial

Channel: PSD Box Official

Views: 170,412

Rating: 4.8550725 out of 5

Keywords: photoshop, tutorial, psd box andrei oprinca, andrei oprinca, psd box, psd box tutorials, manipulation, tutorials, surreal, artworks, sun rays, light effects, create sun rays in photoshop, realistic sun rays tutorial, photoshop cc tutorials, light rays, light rays in photoshop

Id: cAO_QSHxpXI

Length: 8min 7sec (487 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 11 2016