Light rays in Images

[HairyHaggis]

Hi folks,

Do any of you gurus in here know how to enhance or add light rays into images. I often take shots of sunlight coming through clouds and woodland shots etc, to the rays not appearing too well in the shot once off the camera etc.

Will PS CS allow me to enhance these rays, or can they be added artificially ???

Thanks in advance, hope you can help. :righton:

[KeithM]

Hi Steve.

I'm not an acomplished sunbeam shooter but in a recent rework of one of my shots in B&W Evening shot (http://theswampbbs.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11830) I paid special attention to the sunbeams...

Working from RAW in EX convertor, I checked the lightvalues around the sunbeams ( darkest to lightest ) and then steepened the tone curve between those values to accentuate the contrast. This was done as part of creating an overall tone curve that converted the image to give the most pleasing overall look. No reason why you can't do the same in editing.

Exposure was biased towards retaining highlight detail which would have helped I guess.

Another technique that may help is Local Contrast Enhancement where you apply a wide-radius USM ( say 40 pixels radius, amount 40, threshold 0 ) to the image. I duplicate the background layer, apply the USM to the new layer and then set opacity to give the desired effect. This also permits you to mask out those areas where you don't want to enhance ( so you could opt to just enhance the sunbeams ). Watch out for haloing around extreme light/dark transitions as well - again these can be suppressed with a bit of mask.

Keith.

[Keith Cocker]

Steve,

There is a plug-in from AutoFX called Mystical which is very effective in allowing you to "create" lighting effects in images. It's not cheap but is well worth it if you want to do this sort of thing - very flexible and "realistic".

Best wishes

[HairyHaggis]

Thanks for your replies folks :righton:

Keith M .... I am not that experienced in Photoshop either and I really need to be getting myself a Wacom too pretty soon :cool:

Keith ****er ... will take a look, see if I can get hold of a demo :rockon:

Thanks again guys

[Bill C]

In PS CS you could use Filter/Render/Lens Flare and play with some of the settings .... could use edit/fade to fade the effect and/or change blend mode on the fade to enhance the effect.
Bill