Lighting Trends and Effects

There Is a new lighting trend primarily associated with today’s advertising and commercial fashion industries. I called this effect morning light. Personally I hate the effect, but nonetheless its popularity seems to be growing today and even I must learn to change with the times.

If you do not enjoy shooting directly into the sun, there is a Photoshop process that will apply this for us. Leaving our original photograph untouched and unharmed. The idea of applying this in Photoshop appeals to me, since my own personal style is still vivid and bright. Through the magic of Photoshop we can now enjoy the best of both worlds, while leaving our original image unaltered.

While I show you this process, I am also going to teach you how to create actions in Photoshop, so that we can re-create repetitive tasks. For those of you new to actions I would suggest follow along closely and create your own Morning Light Action, because actions or something that will make your life much easier. Additionally this will provide more consistency and accuracy and as mentioned before, save you time with repetitive tasks.

To create an action, first click new action. A Dialog box will open, prompting you to name your action, Morning Light in this case.

Create a new layer and name the layer Flair. Now select the color white. Select the graduate tool. Set to graduate tool properties to Graduate/Transparent and select Radial Graduate from the tool styles.

Beginning at the upper left-hand corner, drag the graduate tool about three quarters down the page to the Right, in one fluid motion. Now set the Layer style blending mode to Screen.

Create another new layer and name the layer Tent. From your top menu; go to Image, Adjustments and select Photo Filter and select a warm photo filter and click apply. Leave the Mood set to normal.

Now stop recording your action, we’re finished.
Play with the Layer Fill properties until you are completely satisfied with the effect.