Mysterious Lighting Effect You Can Create in Photoshop

What We’re Making

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you a nice and easy way to use the Lighting Effects
filter in Photoshop to add a mysterious ambiance to almost any graphic. To see the effect
in action, hover over the image below:

Getting Started

This effect typically works best on graphics that are a bit less saturated and bright. You’re welcome to
use our original graphic to try this effect out on, otherwise, we suggest you do the following if you’re
working with a bright graphic with vibrant colors.

• Go to Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation
• Decrease the brightness and saturation of your graphic until you feel like it’s more

fitting for this effect.

Once you have a graphic ready to use, continue on to the next part of the tutorial.

Render the Lighting Effect

This effect essentially centers around the lighting effects filter. If you’ve ever worked with the filter
before, you may already have a few guesses as to how to accomplish this. However, you have
nothing to worry about if you have no experience with this filter, because we’re going to go
through the process, step by step.

First, go to Filter > Render > Lighting Effects.

You should be immediately greeted with a
bunch of confusing settings and a thumbnail of your image:

This is simply the default lighting effects settings. We’re not going to use them, but I’d like to
quickly explain what a few of the different settings do:

Configure the First Light

Be sure your Light Type is set to Spotlight. There are 4 handles surrounding the center of the
light: The Handle with the line extending towards the center along with the handle on the
opposite side determine the length of the light. The other two handles determine the width.
Additionally, the center of the light can be dragged to reposition the light.

From any of the 4 handles, the light can be rotated. It’s also important to know that the handle
with the line extending towards the center is the source of the light, meaning that the light will
appear to come from that direction.

With all this in mind, reposition your first light source and settings to reflect what is shown in
the diagram below:

Configure the Second Light

Add a new light into the image (as mentioned earlier, drag a new light from the lightbulb
icon into the image area), and configure it to look like this. We want it to appear as if it’s a single
ray coming in, separate from our large, first light source, so we want it to be thin, and coming in
at a slightly different angle.

Switch Between Lights

You may have noticed that as soon as a new light was created, the settings and handles
for your other light disappeared. They can STILL be editied! To switch between lights,
just click the white center of the light.

Doubling Up

Often times, you’ll need to double up lights in order to create bright streaks of light streaming
in over your graphic. To do this, simply add an additional light source that’s approximately
the same width and length, and going in about the same direction as the light you’re trying to
increase the intensity of.

When you create a light to double up with, you may want to decrease the intensity and focus by
pretty large amounts, as we’re simply trying to increase the overall intensity of the first beam.
We don’t want to give the light source an overly hard appearance.

Add More Streams of Light

Add another stream of light, coming from a different angle, in a different area of the image.
It should appear as if the streams are being separated by an object in the way, such as light
pouring through bars of a jail cell, or something of the like.

Finished!

Just Press OK to apply your lighting effects filter, and you’re all set to go. If things don’t turn
out looking great, just undo the filter, and go back to Filter > Render > Lighting Effects.
It will keep the setup previously used, so you shouldn’t have trouble making any modifications!

Tags | lighting effect, mysterious, Photoshop