Photoshop Workbench 209: Simulating Off-Camera Lighting With Photoshop’s Lighting Effects Filter
Purchase a Downloadable QuickTime Video
As many of you know, I sing the praises of Photoshop’s Curves adjustment from the highest hilltops. When your goal is to selectively lighten or darken part of a scene, Curves is a powerful tool indeed. That said, today I plan to introduce you to another intriguing contender in the controlled lighting arena — the Lighting Effects filter. The neat thing about this filter is that it permits you to add multiple lights with different angles, intensities, and properties all in one pass of the filter. It’s Photoshop’s version of studio lighting. Unfortunately, the Lighting Effects filter does have a few weaknesses. The biggest is that it doesn’t function on 16-bit files. Additionally, the Lighting Effects dialog could use a bigger preview window and a more approachable interface. Despite these flaws, this filter is still very much worth exploring.
Thank you to Jonas Mattsson for your submission to today’s Workbench.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010 at 6:43 am
I would like to include some corrections and additions to your podcast about the Lighting Effects filter.
The sliders for light intensity and exposure are indeed working the same way – till you have just one light source. With multiple lights the intensity changes the power of just the selected light, while the exposure has an overall effect. It is true to the metaphor of powering up and down the individual lights, and increasing/decreasing the exposure.
The matte/shiny slider regulates the quality of the surface. Matt reflects just the diffuse light. Shiny material reflects also the specular light. On the other side, the plastic/metallic slider regulates the way how the light interacts with the material. Plastic just adds the color of the light to the color of the material, metallic multiplies the two colors. So if you shine a white light on a red surface, if it is plastic, the highlights end up pale red. The metallic surface has highlights of the surface color – bright red in this case.
You also missed an interesting part of the plugin (as it was not really usable for your example image) – the texture channel. You can set it to some of the color channels or masks and it will render as a 3d texture realistically lit by the setup lights.
I have been watching your videos for a long time and it has always had something that was new for me. Thank you for the work. And all the best in the New Year!
Friday, January 15, 2010 at 7:46 pm
I knew of this tool Mark but have yet to use it mostly for lack of understanding. After watching the tutorial a few things clicked and now I’m ready to apply it to my fashion photography. Thanks for this and all the other tutorials!