How to Light a photo in Photoshop

Get ready to relight your photos in Photoshop. I’m amazed at how many people tell me they have never heard of the really powerful LIGHTING EFFECTS filter.

In this Photoshop Tutorial we are going to use the Lighting effects filter to simulate real lighting. This filter has a lot of powerful features. I’ll show you how to use them in this tutorial. We are going to d 2 projects. The first is adding colored gels in Photoshop and the second is relighting a scene and adding texture. This is also part 1 of a 3 parter on the Lighting effects filter, look for the other 2 parts here on PhotoshopCAFE. Please watch the video for more detailed explanations and extra tips. This written component will serve as a great reference for you.

To make the 3D and other retired features work in Photoshop, do this

This is part 1 of a series. Part 2 is here.

Lighting effects isn’t working?

I have received a lot of messages about different things not working, here are the common solutions.

Make sure you are in RGB mode and 8bit color. (under Image>Mode)
If you don’t see the controls, press Cmd/Ctrl+H
If its not working try going to Preference>Performance and make sure Use Graphics Processor is turned on.
Sometimes you have to quite Photoshop and go back in when changing texture channels, as it has a few little bugs.

Making Colored Gels in Photoshop

Here is a photo I grabbed from Adobe Stock. Lets start with a double gelled spotlight effect

Step 1.

Choose Filter>Render>Lighting effects
(note, you need to be in RGB mode and 8 bit for this to work, you can find this under Image>Mode)

There are 3 types of lights available

This is spot which is a spotlight / floodlight

Second light is a point light. This is a like a lightbulb in space.

Third is an infinite. This is a directional light, like the sun.

Step 2

Under the presets at the top, choose a Triple Spotlight. These presets are quick ways to get started and some of them are quite cool looking.

You’ll see this

Step 3

Zoom out but using the zoom settings in the bottom corner, or Alt+scroll wheel on your mouse.

You can drag on the points to change the size brightness and angle of the light.

Adjust the hotspot for a softer falloff.

Step 4

Click on color to add some color to the light.

Drag inside the square swatch to choose the color. It works just the the color picker in Photoshop.

Step 5

Adjust the intensity to choose the brightness of the light

Step 6

You can brighten the rest of the photo with the ambience slider. This adjusts the overall brightness of the entire image.

Step 7

Choose a different light to adjust. You can select by clicking the light in the Lights panel.

Step 8

Let’s choose a complimentary color. A nice orange this time.

Step 9

For the 3rd light, you can hide it by clicking the eye icon next to it in the lights panel, or select it and press the trash icon to remove it.

In this case, let’s keep it but lower the intensity so we can still see some of the chalk in the middle of the image. (the smoke effect is made by throwing chalk).

And the result looks like we lit the sides with colored lights, or colored gels on spotlights. Let’s continue..