From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

Making a subject glow

From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

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Making a subject glow

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- [Instructor] Hi, I'm Chris Orwig and welcome to Photo Tools Weekly. In this week's episode, we are in Photoshop and we are going to begin a fun, multi-part project. We'll start off this week by looking at how we can work with the original image and here, we'll look at how we can add some light and glow to the subject. Then in the subsequent episodes, we'll explore how we can add wings and also, this lighting effect that you can see here. All right, well, let's begin by working with our image. And for this first image, we're going to take about three or four steps. It will begin by looking at how we can add a lighting effect and then we'll use a selection and mask to limit that to a certain area. Then we'll also work with curves to brighten up the overall image. And last but not least, we'll add a little bit of a glow using a layer style effect. Okay, well, here's how this works. We'll copy the background layer. And on this new background layer, we're going to name this one Light, because we're going to do a lighting effect here. And then we'll go to our Filter pull-down menu, choose Render and Lighting Effects. This is a fun filter to use. I have a whole course dedicated to working with light in Photoshop and this one of the filters I cover in it. And one of the things that you can do with this filter is you can go to this pull-down menu and choose an option like Soft Omni, which is the one I want to use here. Let me zoom out so you can see this. We can reposition this or hover over this little edge to extend where that's going. And we can click on this to drag that out. And really, what I'm paying attention to is the background. Now, it's lighting the subject too much. That's okay and you'll see why in a second. I'm just looking at the background mostly. I want to really think about how it's affecting that area. So I'm just going to click and drag that out. Maybe right around there. Then click Okay. All right, so first up, use the Filter, Render, Lighting Effects, Soft Omni. Next step is to go back to our background layer and choose our Selection tool. Go to Select Subject. And here, we're going to select the subject and then zoom in. With this tool, either add or subtract to fix this up. So I'll zoom right in. And let's start up here. And I'm just going to add to my selection any area where it just had a little bit of trouble making the selection. And it looks like for the most parts, it did a really good job. So there's not a lot to do here. Just make our way down. This area here, I'll just make the brush small and hold down the Option key. Need to subtract this background. We don't want that there. And then make sure we have it all out, so I'm just going to do that over here too. And we can add any area in just by painting over that too. So we're just going back and forth with a little teeny brush just making sure all the details are good. Lost a little bit of the finger there. And if you use a little small brush with a lot of this work, you can get it just right. So that's why I'm zoomed in so far. I want to make sure it's good, because I'll be using this selection in multiple ways. We'll turn it into a mask, we'll turn it into an effect for adding a glow, and a couple of other things too. So we want to get this one right from the get-go. So if ever you know that you're doing something which, I don't know, maybe involves a creative effect like we're doing here, you want to spend the time upfront to get it right from the get-go. Okay, so let me just do a little bit more of this and then we'll say that is enough. All right, I think that's probably enough. Next step. With quick selection, whenever you use that, you want to go to Select and Mask. And it's helpful sometimes to turn on a little bit of edge detection, a little bit of smoothing out here, and just a touch of feather too. I think that will be pretty good. All right, then from there, we'll go to our Output Settings at the bottom and click Okay. So we just outputted this to a selection. We basically made a good selection. That was step number two. Step number three was to go to this Light layer and to add a layer mask and then invert that. So first, add it. Second, invert. One way to do that is to go up to the Properties panel. Clicked on the wrong one there, sorry about that. And go to the Mask area and click Invert. And what that allows us to do is to invert the mask so that it's now just on the background. Another way to do that, which is what I typically do, is Command-I on a Mac or Ctrl-I, that also inverts. And so here now, it's almost like we had a studio light behind the subject illuminating the scene, which is kind of cool, right? So we're starting to change the look and the image. All right, next step, curves. This curves adjustment's going to be global, so just kind of of overall. I'm just looking to brighten up the subject and we get a little bit of brightening on the background too and so we're brightening everything up. But we still have that nice glow coming in. If the glow is too strong, drop down the layer a little bit. Right, so you can see how we're changing the look and the mood in the image in a pretty fun way. All right, well, for this week, we have one more step that we're going to do then we'll do the other steps in another episode. But the last one that I want to do is one where I want to add a glow effect around the subject. And to do that, we're going to use this mask here. So I'll copy the background layer. I'm going to drag this to the top and name this layer Glow. For a moment, I will turn off the visibility of everything else so I can really focus on this one. Then on my great selection and mask that we have here, we'll copy and paste that by pressing Option on a Mac, Alt on Windows, then click and drag. That then copies and pastes the mask to there. And if we click on that, we can invert that. So now, we have the subject by herself on this layer. Now, if you double-clicked the layer, it will open up your Layer Style effects. One of them is Outer Glow. If we add this Outer Glow and let me just to make a really big outer glow here, maybe something like this, what we can see is that it's glowing a little bit in the background. If I turn on a back layer like this, you can see that effect. But watch what happens. If I'm on this layer and I decrease the fill amount, all of the sudden the subject disappears and all that remains is the glow. You'll see this better now. So when I go here and I say here's my fill and I decrease that, now I just have this glow. Of course, the glow needs to be fine-tuned, but I wanted to illustrate the idea that we're not using anything on the layer except the mask and the filter here or the effect. So if we double-clicked this, we can then say, okay, let's now kind of fine-tune this and see how much we want this to glow, what's the opacity of the glow. We could have a lot of fun and kind of make it bigger or smaller. We could change the opacity and have it just slightly kind of coming from behind the scenes there. And then click Okay. And if you look at that before and after, what we're kind of building towards is this sort of glowing type of a look with this image, which is kind of fun. Now that we've accomplished that, we're ready to go to our next step. But we will do that next week in the next episode of Photo Tools Weekly. So be sure to come back to see how we are going to finish off this project. I hope to see you then and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. Bye for now.

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