Alistair Kerr Photography: You can't always stick a light where you want it... So cheat in Photoshop.

Monday, 20 May 2013

You can't always stick a light where you want it... So cheat in Photoshop.

There are times you'd like to place a flash-head to light an area, but there's no way you can. My recent "No Rest For Old Skateboarders" post actually bears this out, I really wanted to light the graffiti on the back wall behind the skaters, but that would have meant placing a light in the middle of a very busy skatepark, the chance of the flash-head getting knocked over was very high. There is a way around this using Photoshop.

I saw this technique a year or so ago, Glyn Dewis had posted a how too video on YouTube, the video is at the foot of this post, in Photoshop simply using a soft paint brush tool on an additional layer and then changing the designation of the layer to 'overlay' and fiddling about with the opacity percentage to get the your desired effect.

Okay I went a little OTT here on the hair eyes and beard, but honestly it works, though I'm expecting a knock on the door from the Photoshop police at any moment.

Once you've set the layer to overlay it all calms down a lot and give the areas painted over a much lighter effect. A bit too much in this case, so I played with the opacity slider and dropped it to about 50%, that worked for me, enough lightening to make it look like I'd placed a light actually on the ramp behind the skater.