In the world of photography there are many fads that come and go. Lighting up with colored neon lights takes time on social media. We may not have access to this type of lighting or we may want to put it in some old image … So we are going to learn how to illuminate our photographs with colored lights in Adobe Photoshop.
If it can be done with the camera, it doesn’t make sense to do it on the computer. It is something that I always carry to the letter with my personal photographs. Another thing is what the client asks you and if he wants colored lights and you don’t have them, you have to recreate them with a program.
Today we are going to recreate them with Adobe Photoshop and it is surprising how easy it can be. The method I saw a long time ago on Instagram. And as much as I have searched for it, I cannot find the reference to name it here.
We only need the program in question, a photo that looks good with this technique and know two or three things about the layers and the tool Degraded. Let’s do it.
11 EASY PHOTOSHOP TOUCH-UPS to be the EDIT MASTER
Create colored lights with Adobe Photoshop
You have to have one contrast photography, that allows to play with the color in the lights and shadows. In this case we are going to see it with a sculpture that we find in the Regional Archaeological Museum of Alcalá de Henares.
We develop the photo with our workflow.
We create as many empty layers as colors we want to put in the image. As easy as going to the menu Layer> New> Layer. In this case we are going to put two.
We mark the first empty layer in the window Layers and select the tool Degraded.
In the tool configuration bar we choose, within the Gradient editing, the option Front Color / Transparent.
And we double click on it, in order to be able to choose the color with which we want to illuminate the scene.
In the window Gradient editor we click on the square on the left and look for the chosen shade.
Now it only remains to click on an area of the photograph with the mouse and move it to the point where we want to see the color gradient.
Finally, we go to the window Layers and we choose within the blending modes the one of Color.
As you can see, the effect is perfect. You just have to try the gradient until you find the one that looks best in our photograph. Few things are so simple in this world of Adobe Photoshop.