Lightroom Bites 006 - Adding light rays to an image

Hi, my name's Joe Houghton and this is Lightroom Bites number 6. Today's tip comes out of a talk that I did last night and somebody asked me whether it was possible to add light rays in Lightroom. Now I'm not the most creative person in the world when it comes to doing this stuff, but there's certainly an easy way to do this in Lightroom. Some of you may be able to make much more of it than I do, but I'm just going to show you how to do it anyway. So the tool that I would use for this is the Radial Filter tool. So let's create a Radial Filter. If your Radial Filter has got settings already set from last time or whatever, when you come into it, just go up to where it says Effect and hold the Alt or the Option key down, and then Effect changes to Reset. So click on that and then it will reset everything. To 0. We've got the Radial Filter tool open, so just click and drag and draw a longish oval like this. And then you move the centre of the oval down to roughly halfway between where you want it to start and its end point, which is about there. Now move over to the edge of the Radial Filter on the line, and you get this little double-headed arrow. And now we can rotate the Radial Filter. So you get the idea now. So, and maybe I want to make it a little bit higher. The sun seems to be a bit higher in the sky there. So now I can just relocate that so that it's going to be pointing towards Danny. Okay, so there we go. Maybe make it a bit longer, something like that. And now if I hover over the center and just wait for a second, The green mask that I've got shows that at the moment the Radial Filter effect is going to be on the outside of the Radial Filter. I can change the colour of that mask if green doesn't suit you. Shift+O changes from green to white, black to red. There we are, I'm back to green. Now I'm colourblind, I don't see red very well, so green works for me. But what I want to do is I want the effect to be on the inside of the Radial Filter. So we need to invert the Radial Filter, and there's the invert box. So we can either click on that box, but to be honest, I find that box really small to kind of hit with my mouse. And the shortcut key to do an invert, yeah, is the apostrophe key. So let's just do something crazy. Let's just bring the exposure all the way up outside. There we are. So you can see now the effect of the Radial filter on the outside. Now, if I click on the invert, it brings it to the inside and outside again. Or if I use the apostrophe key, same thing. So immediately you can see the effect of that, of that Radial filter. But we can tweak this a little bit so that it's not quite as in-your-face as it is there. So the first thing that I would probably do is I would click on the feather and I would bring the feather up something like this. And what that does is it just feathers the edges of that light coming through the trees. So that perhaps looks a little bit more believable than, you know, such a hard-edged light. But I mean, you know, you can tweak that to suit. So there we are, we've got the feather. Now, other things that you might want to do The contrast— if you put the contrast up and down, you're going to see a difference. So there we've kind of got a desaturated look. We've got a slightly more saturated look when we bring this contrast up. Another thing that you can play with is the highlights, and obviously that's going to either brighten or darken the light ray. So have a play with that depending on your own image. The texture and clarity— if you take down texture and clarity, then it's going to make— have an effect on that light ray coming through. And texture and clarity can kind of give the effect of perhaps, you know, a slightly misty look. So if your light rays are coming through fog or mist, then use texture and clarity to bring the opalescence up. But remember that you probably want to just have that in certain areas. So let's paint away the texture and clarity down at the bottom over the 2 figures here. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go up to the right-hand corner here and the brush and find the Erase brush. Okay, now you can either click on Erase and use the brush, or you can just take the brush as it is and hold the Alt or the Option key down and you see the brush changes from a plus to a minus. Once it's on a minus, now it's going to brush away the effect. So if I don't want the effect further down and over those figures, I can just use the brush and brush away onto the figures there the effect of that light. Okay, so there we go. And then If I take that back up to the centre and hold it over, we can see where the mask is being applied and where it's not. And if you want to brush it back in, just come back in and brush it back in, you see. So now we can put it back in on Danny and where it was brushed away. So it's quite easy to kind of tweak this as you want it. So I think that's actually too much on texture and clarity, so I'm just going to bring those back a little bit more, something like that. But I think that's probably getting to where I want. The other thing, of course, you can do is you can use the temperature slider to either warm up or cool down that shaft of light. So again, just match it to the sunshine or look that you want of the light coming down through the trees. But if we bring the History panel up now on the left-hand side— and the shortcut key to open the left-hand panel is F7 on a Windows machine, Function+F7 on a Mac— and we can go back down to before we did anything. Okay, and then let's go back up to the top and see after. There we are. So there's quite a difference between the before and the after on this image. So there it is, a Radial Filter tool to add a light ray to your images. And we're done.