Light Rays

It's a little sloppy, I apologize! I did it fast while my kids were destroying my living room :) But the concept is easy to follow, and once you know the technical steps, you can get creative.

Open a new file, and if the background isn't black, paint bucket it :)

Then select your paintbrush tool, set the foreground color to white, hardness to 100% and then make a bunch of little dots. Make it a smaller sized brush, and there's not really a rhyme or reason to placement. But! Be smarter than me, start lower in the image, maybe 3/4 of the way down. You'll see why....

Increase the brush size, reduce the opacity to 30-40% and brush around the little dots.

Then, go to the filter tab, blur, radial blur. Set it to Zoom and between 90-100. Then click okay.

Once it finishes, go to Filter and click radial blur at the very top of the drop down. Do this several times. I think I did it 7-8 times.

Now, if you started low enough, you won't have to do this step. But when I needed to do was duplicate my layer, flip it over. Fo those of you who started low enough, just flip your image vertically.

Then, in the Edit tab, go to transform, or click command T. You can then increase the size, starting by dragging the rays to the bottom of the image and then outward to the sides.

Then I like to use the perspective transform, also found under the Edit tab, and make it look like the rays are coming towards me.

This step is optional, but I like it. I add a new layer and select the radial gradient tool.

Then click and drag from the top of your image about halfway down.

You end up with a gradient like this, but also remember to reduce the opacity a bit.

The next step is a gaussian blur, under the Filter tab in blur. Adjust it between 15-30 per your liking.

Then I like to zoom out, and perspective transform the whole thing to fill the image space completely.

And here is the end result! Then you use it with the screen, overlay, or soft light blend mode depending on the look you are trying to achieve. Good luck, let me know if you have any questions!

www.arastanphotography.com

How to make your own Sparkle

Here is a quick tutorial on how to make your own sparkle! You will need to be familiar with the pen tool, paint brush dynamics and layer opacity.

 Start with a new file, black background and second layer.

 Select the elliptical marquee tool, and create a long oval.

Paint bucket in the oval white, and deselect.

Add a motion blur to your oval at a 90 degree angle and up to around 1000 or so.

 Then add a gaussian blur around 25-30.

Duplicate the layer and rotate it 90 degrees.

It should look like this :)

Next step: create a new layer. Then go to your brush, select a 14 px brush at 0 hardness and shape dynamics set to pen pressure.

Select your pen tool. Set one anchor point at the top of your sparkle, and one at the end to make a straight line.

Right click and select stroke path.

Set to brush and check simulate pressure.

Again, duplicate, and rotate 90 degrees. Now you are going to want to merge your first two sparkle lines (the ones you blurred) into one layer and reduce the opacity by half.

Make another new layer. Select your brush tool, bringing the size up around 400-500, 0 hardness. And make a dot in the center of your sparkle. You can adjust opacity as you like.

 Merge your pen tool line layers together. Duplicate, and then rotate and reduce in size to get the smaller sparkle lines in the center. Reduce their opacity to between 50-60%

Lastly, if you want, again, make a new layer. Select the brush tool, reduce and make the size between 1000 and 1200. Make a dot in the middle, and bring the opacity down significantly. And this is what you should end up with :) Then you can merge all of the layers together and save as a psd file, or flatten your image and just use it with the screen blend. Don't be afraid to mess around and change up the opacity, length and size of the sparkle lines to get a unique look :)

Stopping Down: a Facebook Group!

Okay all my photographer friends! Please be sure to check out my new Facebook page: Stopping Down, for a great photography discussion forum with little rules and lots of fun! Great for networking, learning and sharing!

Stopping Down: A Photographer's Form 

Winter Stinks

Winter in the midwest.....usually means people are too smart for portraits. I would't want to be outside taking pictures either, so I don't blame them!

So for me, to pass the time and feed my addiction to portraits, I have been going through older pictures and trying out new edits. Just thought I would share these two because I'm super happy with how they turned out! :)

Broken

Getting a little creative here, I won't go into the detail behind the artistic choice, but it was something I've been wanting to try.

Here is the before:

And here is the after: I call it "Broken"

Kinda cool right? After adjusting the curves and color of the entire image, I found an image of a cracked wall and added portions of it as a new layer. I then blended it to multiply, reduced the opacity and masked most of it besides the cracks and some of the  texture away. The blending helped make it look like it was actually part of the skin.

The background, a canvas, I blended to darken and masked off of me. The coloring is thanks to the wonderful actions from Greater Than Gatsby :) I used a few actions from the Three Nails collection, and then finished it off with a painterly edit and dark vignette.

It's a pretty fun edit to try, I highly recommend it!

I love to Edit!

Editing pictures is probably my favorite part of doing photography. When I get home with a memory card full of new pictures to go through, I'm like a kid on Christmas morning!

Another thing I love to do, is edit for other photographers. And today, I was able to edit a very gorgeous picture for Andi Sinclair from MoonLight Photography 

Here is the Before and After. Thanks again Andi! 

Before

After