- Hey guys, in this
episode I'm gonna show you how to do dramatic lighting in Photoshop. (dramatic music) Hey guys, welcome to Kelvin Designs, my name is Kelvin and I design, and that's why it's called Kelvin Designs. Click right here to subscribe
to my YouTube channel and get all these
episodes as they come out, and click right here to
subscribe to my newsletter to get all the files to follow
along all these tutorials. In this episode, I'm gonna show you how to do dramatic lighting in Photoshop. Here you can see the before and the after. Pretty dramatic change and
it's actually really simple. Let me show you. Okay, so once you've downloaded the file, it'll show up in a folder like this, and you have this JPEG, which you can open in Photoshop. All right, so it starts
off as a colored photo, and the first thing we're
going to do actually is right click on this and
convert to Smart Object. This is so that we can
apply filters and effects that don't actually change the
actual pixels of the image. So the first thing we're
gonna do is go into Filter and do a Camera Raw Filter, and it shows up right here. So let's start with, go in
here and convert to Grayscale. So that's the fourth panel
here, convert to Grayscale, and what we wanna do is
turn down the exposure by about two and a half points. Two to two and a half. This is, for me the equivalent
of turning off the lights. Sometimes in the
highlights, turn that down so it's not quite as
bright, something like this. All right, so the purpose of
this is to essentially say, okay I'm turning off all the lights. I'm gonna go ahead and just make the art just a little bigger. And I'm basically pretending
like I'm in this room and I turn off all the lights, and so that now whatever
brush strokes I put are light that I'm adding to the scene. And granted there is already
some lights here and here, we're gonna go ahead and add
some more dramatic lighting. So the first thing we're gonna do is go ahead and create a new group up here and then a new layer in that group. Okay, and we can go ahead
and double click this group and call it lights, okay. And the first thing we'll do is just take the Lasso
tool, the Polygonal Lasso and just very simply make
a rectangle like this, sorry, a triangle, and we'll go ahead and Edit, Fill with White. Okay, and we can go ahead and de-select over here Command D. All right, and we could turn this into a smart object as well. Which, let's just go ahead and do that. Convert to Smart Object, okay? And the only thing is if I
hit Command T to transform, it's a little off and it's gonna be a
little hard to control. So before, I'm gonna go
into my history right here and right before I converted
that to a Smart Object. I'm gonna try to make this
as straight as possible, something like this. It doesn't really matter if it's 100%, but just so that when you hit Command T, you're as close as possible
to the shape, like that. Now I convert it to Smart Object so that when I hit Command T and I transform and rotate, hit Return, if I hit Command T again, well, the bounding box is
now following that shape which is really useful. Okay, and we'll call this beam like so, as if it was a light beam
and in here on the group. So imagine let's put
this just so we can get, I wanna show you what we're gonna do here. Let's just put this like 45%
and granted it's not blurry and doesn't look like a light beam yet. But if you had a few of these, and we'll just, just for the explanation I'm gonna just make a few
copies here like this. And I want these to have a
little bit of a smoky look to it. So I'm gonna go to the
group here and create a mask and make sure that I'm
black and white here. And then now I got to
Filter, Render, Clouds on the mask, okay. So I'm masking out based on these Clouds. It's a little too, too small that's smoke seems really dense. So I'm gonna Command T the smoke. Actually, it's selecting all the contents. And so I'm gonna hit Escape, unlink that mask and now hit Command T and I'm just adjusting the mask itself. And you can see here is the mask and here's very dense smoke and here's kind of lighter smoke. I'm gonna go ahead and shrink my art board just so that I can really
make this even bigger. I wanna have some sense of smoke but I don't want it to be too
dense, something like that. Okay, all right and all
right, I'm gonna go ahead and just delete these beam copies and go to this beam you can
zoom in a little bit now. And it's a smart object,
which means I can go here and hit Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur. And let's go and do, let's try 25, maybe even more something like this. That's a little too, too much for trace. Let's try 50, 50 is not bad. And hit Ok, all right. And now when I hit Command T once again, it does become sharp, the filters don't show while you're in a transform
mode, but that's okay. It's actually easier to set
where that's going to be. I wanna make this a little bit thinner. So it's a little more directed in a certain direction
and I hit Return or Enter, and there you go. And now I can make a copy of that. And I hit Command T again, except this time I'm
gonna do the other side, something like this. So I want, I'm imagining light
comes in here and down here. So something like this. So let's try that. Make it a little narrower,
rotate it, something like that. Okay, and then now I
have to fill in the gaps. So go like this, like so, hit Return. So every time hold on Alt,
make a copy of the layer, Command T, Rotate, Enter. And again, Command T. And it'd be good to make
them a little thinner. Make sure that all the beams are not always exactly the same size. And I can kind of see that there's some beams going in there. But all hidden in within the smoke which is kind of cool. If I want to, I can move, if the smoke is not an exact right place I can move that around. This is actually kind of good. And so I have that sense of smoke. I need to remember I
changed the opacity to 45 and it's important that
it within this step that I exaggerate all the lighting. So I'm gonna go ahead and bring that back to let's do let's try 90. Okay, 90 is good. Another quick way of
doing that, by the way I'm just gonna hide
all these smart filters is in the Move tool, you go on a layer and on the key pad, you just hit 90, it changes the opacity. That's the shortcut for that. So 90, I'm just hitting 90 really quick. And all my beams are now 90%. All right, yes, there's
some bleeding over here and we'll fix that. But right now, I really wanted to show some of that, the beams, another thing I'm gonna do now is make a copy of the first one here. And let's go ahead and Command T that, make it a little bigger. Let's make this a little bit fatter, something like this. And I hit Return. And on this one, I'm going to make it I hit V for the Move tool. And then let's try 40% or 50%, that kind of bleeds over there. I'm not really, it kind
of takes away a little bit of those two evident beams. That's, it's a little too much. Let's do 40%, that's pretty good. And now I can go ahead and make a copy and bring it something like this. Let's make it really fatter that, okay. And we're adding another, just so that it was a little too strong, the, it looked like brush
strokes a little bit. All right, so this is the
first start, the first step. And let's go ahead and group all these, so we select them and then you can hit
the little Group button and we'll call this left window, like so. And let's go ahead and
take the first one here hold down the Alt, make a copy and it brought it here. Let's bring it out of this group here and let's make a new group, put this make sure this is inside and call this right window. All right, so we're gonna
do this window here, select that, all right. And let's do the first one, something like this. Let's make them a little narrower, something like that, not too bad. Like I said, don't worry
about bleeding over we'll fix that in a moment. And then the other side,
something like this. A little more, a little
further, something like that. If you see that there's a corner, just stretch it out it doesn't matter. All right, something like that. Maybe a little higher
somewhere, there we go. Okay, and now I can fill
in the gaps, like so. There's a little bit, let's move this one with the arrow keys, move
it a little to the right. And then this one is a rotation, like so. Something like that, take this one it'd be a little thinner. Yep, not bad. Okay, the gaps, these are a little strong. Let's say a command
click to go onto the one that I wanna go on to, and let's make this one a little thicker so that the beams are not
quite that pronounced. Okay, something like this. And I want the light to
somewhat fade a little bit as it goes to here. So what I'm gonna do is on this Group, that's within this Group
is the right window I'm gonna make a mask and
go to the Gradients tool, make sure that the gradient I have is a foreground to transparent in this case, foreground is black. So if I click and drag my
mouse from here to here, it's gonna slowly fade. So that light kind of fades. That was a little too much. So either I change the
opacity of my gradient or which I prefer to do
is zoom out a little bit and just use the gradient
in a different way. There you go, something like that. Maybe a little bit over
here, a little too much. Let's go and do it again. Again, too much. Something like that. And let's go into left window, do the same thing. Yep, a little, a little strong there and a little bit down here. Oop, too much. Just little touches, I don't wanna go too strong. And then another thing is, I don't wanna go past this, if it goes a little bit past, sure. But I don't want these weird lines. So I'm gonna go ahead and make a little gradient right there. So there's a little glow, which is fine, but not too much. And same with this right here. Something like this. Here we go. Okay, we can take off a little bit there. Okay, okay so now we have those lights and they're all within the smoke, which we could edit if we wanted to. But for now, well, I'm
pretty happy with this. Okay, and then the other
thing we're going to do is we're going to make some lens flares. So create a new layer and go ahead and Fill it, Edit, Fill right here with black. Okay, and we're gonna
make this a smart object, put it in Screen mode. And so black on Screen mode
is basically transparent. And now if you go and do a
Render, Lens Flare, you'll see. So I'm gonna, I'm trying
to do it for this window. So I'm trying to do similar direction. Something like this, okay. 100, and it's a 5,300. That's the first lens flare, I hit Ok. And then I'm gonna go ahead and do add another one Lens Flare. And by default, I'll say do you wanna edit the one you have or add one? My default is that I add one and I'm gonna go ahead and
let's try these other ones. Which is 35, 105 or the Movie,
I think 105 is pretty good. Maybe 100 is too much, let's do 80. Okay, so I'm adding more, more artifacts. Okay, and now I can take the Move tool and move this, granted
there's chopping happening which I can fix in a moment. Something like this. And I want to, if I go to
Adjustments in Hue/Saturation, I don't want any color, I just de-saturate that completely. Okay, and again, this is a smart object so it just became a effect, all right. And another thing that I'd like to do for this type of lighting
is to Gaussian Blur. The lens flare, you'll see,
it looks like a dust motes almost 50 is maybe too high
let's try 20 is too little. Let's bring it up a little bit. Something like this, 20, 21, you know 30. Let's zoom out and see
what we're dealing with. See those, I wanna keep these lines, but I don't want all these
some little spots is nice, but not too much. Once again, it's a smart filter so I can always come back and oh I did too much or whatever. It's easy to change. So you see, now I have this lens flare that's not quite as pronounced and it just helps light this the scene granted it needs a mask. So go ahead and mask, go to my Gradient and I'm gonna say,
let's take it from here. Hold on the Shift key to
make it nice and straight down to there and a
little further this way. Okay, oop, that was a little too much. And click and drag right there. Okay, I really wanna give a sense of like there's a strong light coming from outside would be better not in the middle there but on the right side,
something like this, all right. The Gaussian Blur, let's go back, double click
Gaussian Blur to edit that. Let's try 20, see what
that gives us hit Ok. And that didn't work out. Let's undo that. So by editing the Gaussian Blur actually went in and
edited the other effects and it moved my point of lens flare. So it's important that when
you do both lens flares you don't move them before you add them. That's a little unfortunate,
but that's the way it is. Okay, I kinda like it. And let's, I can just
hold down the Alt key and duplicate it, bring it over here. Something like this. And that's pretty cool. Okay, now the trick is right now, all my lighting is just white. It's just white being brushed
on top of the darkened photo. Actually, before we get
into the final step, there is one more thing I'd like to do. And let's just group these, and column what they are, the flares. And then we'll do another
one and we'll call this, let's just call them spots. And I go in here, and I take a brush. It's just a round simple brush. Let's make it 1,500 pixels, zero hardness, a D for default colors,
X for white on top. All right, and then I just, I do a spot and granted it's a big,
big, big spot right now. V for move, and then Command T. What I'm trying to do at this point is just complexify the
lighting a little bit. So I like to do that by starting with a perfectly round brush, rotating a little bit and
giving some kind of movement. Some perspective is
Command, Alt and shift. So I'm creating a perspective
on this round brush. I'm gonna bring this down a little bit and like this and then make
this quite a bit bigger. And it looks like a, it looks
very intrusive right now, but you'll see in a moment. It should be a little, a little longer. So I'm gonna undo some of that perspective something like this,
all right, hit Return. And then I'm gonna make a copy and rotate Command T, rotate it. I just want a little bit of lighting in some places, and you'll see I'm gonna
tone it down considerably here on the ground. Let's rotate that, make
that a little smaller, something like this. You can even bring it down here. Okay, now these spots are much too strong. So I would hold on V and then like 20%, something like that, it's not bad. Now, you see how this is all gray instead of it being lighter cobblestone, that is because these are, all these effects I've done so far have just been adding white. So the trick, here's where
the real trick comes in. I'm gonna turn up these to 30%. The real trick comes in here. I go on top of the image
that I started with, and I darkened it and I make a new layer and I had D for default colors and then Alt, Delete which fills. The other way of filling
that it's just going, Edit, Fill, fill with Black, all right. So what this does is it
hides the image below and just shows me all the
lighting effects that I have. So the clouded, you
know, beams and the lens, the blurred out lens flares, my little light beams and so on. And now when I go into channels and I hold down the Command
key or a control on a PC, and I click on the RGB, it turns these pixels into a selection. So basically I've converted this image that you see here into a selection. And to demonstrate what that looks like. You can go to quick mask
and hide the RGB layer and you'll see my
selection is now everything that used to be white,
pretty simple, okay? So I cannot go out of quick mask and go back to my layers
and let's go ahead and just group all the
lighting effects right here, group that double click
it to call it lighting. And we can go ahead and hide this for now. And then this black layer
is no longer needed for now. All right, and then I go
here and I make a copy, okay? Drag it down, go into
the Camera Raw Filter, and instead of plus 2.5,
let's just start by doing one. So I'm overexposing it by one step. We could even do two. Let's just do two for now and what we can come
back and play with this. Hit Ok, and then the
selection that I have, I turn it into a mask, very simple. What did I do? I had, let's put the black over. This is, I had a selection
and I turned it into a mask and instead of adding white,
I'm revealing an image of, the same image that's overexposed. So as opposed to just adding white, I'm actually revealing pixels
of what would have looked, what the image would have looked like had the lighting actually been like that. So that's a more natural
way of showing that. And what's nice is I can go in here in the Camera Raw Filter and add effects. So for example, I want a little
less clarity in the lights. So I'm kind of making
it a little bit fuzzier which you can see here. So it makes that sort of
like gleaming lights effect and we can increase the
exposure just a little bit, not too much because you don't wanna lose, you don't wanna lose
too much of the detail. So 2.5 maybe a little high. Something like this, so do
we wanna open up the shadows? Sure, that's nice. I like turning down the clarity 'cause it gives that sort of
fuzzy, bright, light filling. So let's hit Ok. And that, and we can see, you can see how that
it gave that glowy look in the lights there. Now, if I feel like I've lost a little bit of my light rays and so on, I can always go in here
and add an adjust this, what this looks like my mask, the easiest way is Command
M to bring up your curves. And so if I add an S-curve, for example, or let's just let's just
lighten the whole thing. So before, after, see I'm essentially by lighting the mask I'm revealing more dark hides and light reveals. So I'm adding a little more,
maybe a little too much but let's do it like this, okay. All right, so that's the essential part. I would finish this by doing
a Command Alt, Shift, E which makes another layer on
top of everything that's below. And I would convert this to a Smart Object and do another Camera Raw. Within this I would like
to always do a little bit of a post-crop vignetting
that really helps close the photo up a little
bit, something like this. I like maybe a little bit of clarity to give the, it can make
those bricks come out a little bit more, not too much. Bring on the highlights a little bit, open up the shadows, something like this. And there we go. So that's pretty simple. And it's a pretty, pretty simple way of, it's essentially doing a Dodge and Burn but using the pixels of the image as opposed to just burning out the pixels or adding black or white. So I hope you learned something there. All right, guys, I hope
you liked that episode. And if you did, please share
it on Facebook or Google Plus and leave a comment below if
you want any other tutorials. I'll see you in the next episode.
