Saturday 8 June 2013

Radiant Lighting

Another way to get even more cool effects from the glow layering technique is to apply Lighting Effects.





01. Just layer Glows and Inner Shadows as shown in the Illuminations tutorial.

02. Then turn off the background (and Outer Glows, if you have any) and create a 'New from Visible' layer.

03. Turn everything on again, duplicate your saved channel and blur it (something between 5-10 for example).

04. Activate the 'New from Visible' layer and go to 'Lighting Effects' (thats under Filters -> Light and Shadow) and create two directed lights, one from above and from beneath (or try anything else that looks good to you).
Use the blurred channel as a bumpmap, then hit apply.

05. If you are not completely happy with the smoothness, alpha select the basetext and blur the Lighting Effect layer by 2.

05.a) If you are still not happy, go to
'G'MIC -> Enhancement -> Anisotropic Smoothing'.

Choose 'Amplitude' 100 and 'Anisotropy' to the max.
'Iterations' 2.

[These values are based on monsoonami's Chrome youtube tutorial and work quite well for me.]

Sometimes its good to lower the 'Sharpness' value.

06. After that you can apply a small gaussian curve on the piece for better contrast or even a wavy chrome curve as i did with the smolder piece.

07. The circuit-esque shapes in the Beam text were done with Satin:



Btw, this all started with three gras green Glow-layers and an ochre-brownish Inner Shadow.
I dont always have a clear vision of what i want to create.
I just start with something and later play with the 'Hue/Brightness/Saturation Tool' and possibly changing Modes, until i get something going, that looks good to me.


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