nathanaardvark

Tutorial 161 - Experiment with Light

Added 2016-06-25 09:27:49 +0000 UTC

Light is key to making an image convincing and one of the most powerful ways to evoke mood.

Exploring a variety of lighting arrangements is a simple practice to adopt in your working process, with great benefit.

Working traditionally, the options are limited but here is an opportunity to use photoshop as it was intended, as a tool.

By scanning or photographing a piece of work in progress, importing the image into a digital painting program, and then exploring the lighting options, we can make better informed decisions at crucial points in the process.

This practice is also helps us to better understand form.

Lighting from a variety of sources, figuring out where the light-facing planes are located, where the light starts to fall off, which areas are in complete shadow, are all areas we should think about and explore visually.

The tutorial graphics show some variety in thickness of volumetric light, softness, location, and perhaps distance from the subject too.

To do this I simply duplicated the layer (which is a photo of a sketch) and darkened the duplicated layer, considerably. Then I added a layer mask and reveled the light (from the original layer below) by painting on to the mask.

Using a layer mask is a great way to do this because it allows us to add and subtract nondestructively.