Making An Accurate And Adjustable Lens Flare In Photoshop

On this video Marty Geller from Blue Lightning TV shows you how to add and play with lens flare in Photoshop.

A lens flare can add a nice look to your image. On this video Geller takes you step by step on how to add a flare, change it’s position on the image, change it’s color and finally remove and part of it which you don’t like.

First you need to know that you can’t add a lens flare to an empty layer. Geller’s solution is to add a lens flare and remove it and than create a new black layer and than repeat the last filter used (cmd/cntrl F) – there might be other way to do this but this seems to work fine.

Next you change your blend mode to screen. From here you can play with your flare – you can change the position of the flare by using transform (cmd/cntrl T) – Geller first reduce the opacity of the layer to 0% and after doing the transform he bring it back again. Changing the color of the lens flare is simple – just add a hue saturation layer mask and click the clipping mask icon so that you will only effect the flare layer. To remove a part of the flare just add a layer mask next to the lens flare and paint with a black brush on the areas which you want to remove from the flare. That is more or less it!

We have already looked at adding lens flare to your images on Bryan O’Neil Hughes’ video: “How to Add & Remove Lens Flare in Photoshop” as well as a two videos by Nace called simply: “How to Add Lens Flare to your Image in Photoshop“ and more recently “The Best Way to Use Lens Flares in Photoshop“.

You can find many more Photoshop video tutorials on LensVid’s Photoshop section.

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.