The Best Way to Use Lens Flares in Photoshop

 Nace starts by explaining the importance of understanding where the flare is coming from. You can only add a flare to an image where the subject is lit from the back (or maybe from one of the sides) if you will add a flare to a subject which is only lit from the front it will look strange as our brain does not interpret this as a logical/normal event – so always take a look at your image first to see if adding a flare is the right move.

We start by creating a new layer and have a duplicate of our base layer and the next move is to go to render > lens flare and position it in the right place (you can also choose the type of lens you are “virtually using”). The problem is that we don’t have a lot of play with the flare and it isn’t on its own layer so Nace has a trick – he fills the top layer with black and adds the flare and change the blending mode to screen and now you can move the flare and adjust the color of the flare and basically do anything else that you like with it.

We have already talked about adding lens flare to your images on Bryan O’Neil Hughes’ video: “How to Add & Remove Lens Flare in Photoshop” as well as a previous video by Nace called simply: “How to Add Lens Flare to your Image in Photoshop“.

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).