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[ 77 ]Custom Lens Flares
One of my favorite brushes is the flare brush.
A flare is a great finishing effect when the
occasion calls for it. Remember there’s no need
to add a flare just because you can, but it’s nice
to have some lens flares at the ready when you
need them. So here’s how to create your own:
Step One: Find an image of a lens flare on a
stock site or even do a Google image search for
anamorphic flares. Doing the latter is more of a
gamble, as there’s no guarantee that the image
will be a usable size. You want an image that’s
at least 1000 pixels at its widest dimension.
Normally, flares will be on a black background.
Step Two: Open the image in Photoshop and
remove the color by pressing Shift-Command-
U (PC: Shift-Ctrl-U).
Step Three: Open Levels by pressing Com-
mand-L (PC: Ctrl-L) and click on the left
eyedropper in the group of three eyedrop-
pers. This eyedropper sets the black point in
your image. Click on the background some-
where close to the flare itself and click OK.
This will convert some of the areas around
the flare to black. Now press Command-I
(PC: Ctrl-I) to invert the image, making the
flare black on a white background.
When defining a brush, Photoshop reads
black as opaque, gray areas as semi-transparent,
and white areas as completely transparent. This
means the background needs to be pure white.
You can use Levels once again to push the high-
lights up a little to convert areas that you don’t
want included in the brush to pure white.
Step Four: Now just go under the Edit menu
and choose Define Brush Preset. Name the brush
and click OK. Voilà! You have a flare brush.
Add a new blank layer to your image, press
D then X to set the Foreground color to white,
and click once with the Brush tool to add a
flare anywhere you want. Don’t forget to add
an Outer Glow layer style to match the flare to
the color in the scene.
Step FourStep ThreeSte p TwoStep One©Adobe Stock/rybindmitriy