Enhancing the Lights Effect

PSP 7's new Lights Effect lets you add up to five lights to illuminate your image. You can set various options for each of these lights, including the color of the light, its point of origin, direction, intensity, and more.

With all these controls, you might think that any additional enhancements would be out of the question. However, you can get some very nice effects by applying Lights not to your original image layer but to a second layer instead.

1. Begin either with your own image or with this photo of an Asiatic Lily from my garden:

   

   (To download this image, right-click on the image and select either "Save Image As" in Netscape or "Save Picture As" in MS Internet Explorer.)

   Here's how this image would look if you applied Lights to it with the effect's default settings:

   

2. We're not going to apply the effect to the original layer, though. Instead, click the New Layer button on the Layer Palette to add a layer above the original image layer. (Press L on the keyboard if the Layer Palette isn't yet showing in PSP.)

   Then Flood Fill the new layer with white. Choose the Flood Fill tool, and set white as the Foreground color in the Color Palette. (If you're not sure how to set the Foreground color, click here.)

   Now, apply the Lights Effect to this white layer. Here's the result with the default settings:

   

3. Next, on the Layer Palette, set the Blend Mode of the white lights layer to Multiply. The result will look very much like what you'd get if you applied Lights to the original image, except that with the layer method the highlights are not so harsh:

   

4. Now you can modify the white lights layer to get enhanced effects. In the example below, I used Effects > Blur > Gaussian Blur set to 10 and set the Opacity of the white lights layer to 65. This has the effect of greatly softening the lights.

   

   Experiment to see what other enhanced effects you can get by modifying the lights layer. Try various blurs and other Effects, or try Blend Modes other than Multiply (particularly Overlay, Hard Light, Soft Light, and Burn).

Thanks to my fellow beta testers, Bonesy and Porter, for helping to inspire this tutorial!