Capturing Lens Flare In-Camera can be tricky, especially with modern lenses; because they have coatings specifically to inhibit the effect from occurring. Photoshop has high-quality lens flare effects that can be applied to your photographs non-destructively. In this guide, we find out how.
STEP 1: With an image opened, head into the Layers Tab and create a new blank Layer using the New Layer icon towards the bottom of the Layers Tab. Press D to set the foreground color to black, and press Option Delete (on a Mac) or Alt Backspace (on a PC) to fill the new layer with black.
If you don’t want to use all these shortcodes you can select black as the foreground color in the Color Picker tool, and then use the Paint Bucket Tool to fill the Layer!
STEP 2: Working from the Layers Panel, set the Blend Mode of the new Layer to Screen. This will hide all the pure black pixels but will allow our effect to show through.
STEP 3: Now head up to the Application Bar and select ‘Filter > Render > Lens Flare’. This opens a pop-up window, and you can select from four quality lens flare effects in the panel, and adjust the brightness of the effect that you desire.
You can set the rough position of the Flare effect in the panel window by clicking it and dragging it. Don’t worry too much at this stage, as we will finalize the position of the effect in the next step. Go ahead and press OK once you are happy to commit the change.
STEP 4: Make sure you have the new lens flare Layer selected. You can then reposition the lens flare to where you want it using the short-code Command T (on a Mac) or Control T (on a PC) and using the grab handles to reposition it, and then pressing Enter/Return once you are happy.
