How to Add Light, Warmth & Whimsy to Your Photos

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Have you ever taken a photo of a wonderful moment and then felt disappointed that it didn’t turn out as fabulously as you thought it would? If so, Alishia Osborn, from Just Leesha, is here to show how you can transform an ordinary picture into a dream with this Photoshop tutorial…

I recently took a photo of my daughters reading together that I just loved.

But… I didn’t love the lighting.

The straight out of camera shot was dark and dreary and didn’t lend itself to the moment I felt when I took it.

Thankfully, I had a little bit of light from the window… but it certainly needed some help.

That’s where Photoshop comes in!

This tutorial will show you how I fixed my dark photo…

…and made it light, warm and whimsical.

Let’s get started!

My first step was to straighten out my photo and crop it down.

I wanted to focus more on my girls and not have any distractions from the mess and large bed.

So I grabbed the ‘Rectangular Marque Tool’ and drew around the part of the photo I wanted to keep and cropped away!

Once I cropped my image, I ran an action called Clean Edit by Greater Than Gatsby.

They offer great free actions and I encourage you to try them out.

After the Clean Edit action,  I had a new group folder above my background layer.

In order to keep things organized I always merge my folders into a new layer.

So I duplicated my background: <right click background <duplicate layer.

Once I had a new layer, I merged my Clean Edit photo with it.

<right click new layer <merge visible

(Make sure you uncheck the ‘eye’ on your background layer before you merge, or you will end up merging ALL layers.  See red arrow)

For lack of a better title, I name it Merged.

Now I have a Merged layer and a Background.

Next I decided to add more light.

I wanted a new layer to work on, so I duplicated the Merged layer, (named it Lens Flare, I’m real original I tell ya!) and added a Lens Flare to it.

I used the ’50-330mm Lens Flare’ option and made sure the source of the flare came from the light from the window.

In other words, when placing my flare I made sure it started in the upper right hand corner.

Lens Flare can look pretty wild when you first open it, but remember you can always tone it down by adjusting the opacity once it’s added.

So go crazy and tone it down later!

As you can see below, I also selected ‘Screen’ from the drop down menu instead of ‘Normal’.

Next, I like to get rid of the more obvious light globes.

To me, they make the flare look fake, so I added a layer mask to the Lens Flare layer (say that tens times fast) and brushed them away.

Once I got the flare how I like it, I ran one of my favorite Actions from Florabella called Milk and Honey.

See how soft that Action makes the image?

That’s one of the reason’s why I like it so much!

I loved the result, but I felt the photo needed to be warmed up a bit. So I added a ‘Photo Filter’.

This time around I used ‘Warming Filter 85’ at 25% density.

And this is my final result:

Remember what we started with?

Not bad for a little time spent editing!

To see more examples where I used this lighting trick check out these posts:

I Fake It

A Morning Observation

For more Photoshop tutorials and photography tips, please visit my site www.justleesha.com.

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Written by Alishia Osborn, from Just Leesha. You can find her on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Flickr.