Photoshop Effects: Focus With Light

Written By Steve Patterson

In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we're going to see how to add focus to an image with light, using Photoshop's Lighting Effects filter and multiple light sources.

Here's the image I'm going to be using:

I want to bring more attention to the flower and the woman's face and less attention to the rest of the image. There's lots of different ways to bring more attention to a certain part of an image with Photoshop, but in this tutorial, we're going to be using a very powerful way to focus attention on something, and that's by using light. You could use a subtle amount of light, but for this tutorial, I think I'll go for a more intense effect. Here's the result I'm after:

Let's get started.

Step 1: Duplicate Your Background Layer

The first thing we want to do is duplicate our Background layer since it contains our original image data and we don't ever want to touch that. To quickly copy the Background layer, use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac), and that gives us our copy in the Layers palette:

Photoshop Effects: Press "Ctrl+J" (Win) / "Command+J" (Mac) to duplicate the Background layer.

Normally I would rename the layer to something more descriptive than "Layer 1", but this effect only requires one layer, so there's no need in this case.