From the course: Photoshop Masking and Compositing: Fundamentals

Unlock the full course today

Join today to access over 22,400 courses taught by industry experts or purchase this course individually.

Creating synthetic rays of light

Creating synthetic rays of light - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop Masking and Compositing: Fundamentals

Start my 1-month free trial

Creating synthetic rays of light

In this exercise, I am going to show you how to create what's known as God lighting, which is when you have these bright rays of light that are streaming through the clouds. And we are going to start things off by creating the core effect using a combination of eight different Smart Filters. And if you're working along with me, go ahead and click in the Background layer, down here at the bottom of the Layers panel. Then create a new layer by pressing Control+ Shift+N, or Command+Shift+N on a Mac, and let's go ahead and call this layer rays, and click OK. Next, I want you to fill this layer with black. Black is my foreground color; I assume it's yours as well. So press Alt+Backspace, or Option+Delete on a Mac. Now, because we want to work with Smart Filters, we need to convert this layer to a smart object. So go to the Layers panel flyout menu, click on it, and then choose Convert to Smart Object. Or, once again, if you loaded Dekekeys, you can press Control+Comma, or Command+Comma on…

Contents