How to Turn on the Headlights in a Car’s Photo Using Photoshop

On this video tutorial Aaron Nace from Phlearn demonstrates how to add lights to a car in Photoshop.

This video is more than just a demo of how to do a cool trick. Adding a realistic light source to an image can be a very powerful tool. The first step is to create beams of light using Photoshop that will come out of the headlights of the car in the photo.

In order to do that select the area where the light will be added. Nace uses the field blur and using the small dial on the tool. We can easily change the direction of the light if we want (using cntrl/cmd T) to transform it. The final step here will be to add a little bit of a glow using a layer effect (using outer glow – you can add any color here – Nace adds soft yellow). You can add a layer mask so that the area closer to the car will be more lit than the area further away.

You can find many more Photoshop video tutorials on LensVid’s Photoshop section (and you can find a lot more Phlearn videos on our special Phlearn subsection).

Iddo Genuth
Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.

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