Note to admins and mods, please do not make images smaller, I'd apreciate it greatly since I resized them to 1024x768 so they can be seen directly.

In this tutorial you will learn how to make an image look more vivid, define a lightsource, create lightshafts, and color blur with Adobe Photoshop CS3 (Probably with CS2 aswell)

We will convert a crysis realistic image into a more colorful one

Note: All these efects must be done to your taste, after youre done with this tutorial experiment with other values and see what you get, ill advice futher if a certain effect can be changed to your taste in the tutorial.



we will convert it to something like this:

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Step 1, Setting up your photoshop Space as you find it most confortable.

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Step 2, Duplicate the image in the layer's menu (Pay atention to this, you will have to do this multiple times)

This will be our colorize layer, it will make shadows and light stand out, and colors more vivid, you wont see any changes right now though.

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Ster 3, Open Blending Options (Pay atention to this, you will have to do this multiple times)

Blending options is a key photoshop feature, allows you to apply all kinds of effects to a layer.

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Step 4, Choose soft light in the blend drop selection and set opacity to 50%.

Soft light makes the layer transparent and makes it work like light, so it only has a slight effect, since were using the very same image it makes colors stand out and lights and shadows contrast more, but setting it to 50% (or lower if necesary) makes it a slight adition that makes the image overall, prettier.

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Step 5, create a duplicated layer from the original image, and drag it on top of the layer you made perviusly, this will be our lighsource Layer, now select Filter/Blur/Radial Blur.

On a side note, this layer does many things, and requires the other layers to balance it out without losing what it does.

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Step 6, Drag the intensity bar all the way to the right, select zoom and best quality, after thats done, drag the dot in the sketch you can see all the way to the top left, why? this is to specify the spot where the center of the radial blur will be at.





No, your image isnt screwed, its just that the radial blur makes it all, blurry... well, it was to be guessed, this is what makes all the cool color blending, color standout, increases the intensity of lights and shadows and lightshaft effects if used properly

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Step 7, Time to fix this, easy step actually, just select hard light in the blend mode drop bar shown in the pic.





Oh yeah, much better now, see the diference? hard light is much, much more intense than soft light and it does define patterns on colorful pics, note, that its just too dark and colorful, needs some adjustments to get it to look like you want, and we will also take the chance to give it some blur in the next step.

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Step 8, Make a new duplicated layer from the original image, this will be our motion blur and correction layer, after that, choose Filter/Blur/Motion Blur.

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Step 9, Set the motion blur to any angle you wish, I choosed myself horizontal, now for the ammount of blur, well, its up to the image, since mine is 5000x3000 pixels and yours is 1024x768, I suggest you use a lower value than mine :P

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Step 10, Ok, the image its not meant to be blurry, there is something we have to do in order that it only just blends things a bit and fixes the current problems of the image (its too dark for my taste). Go to Blending options, and set the image to Hard Light at 50% opacity.

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Now its too dark, its becouse there are too many dark layers one on top of an other, its also too colorful for my taste, so lets fix this image using our blur layer :)

Go to Image/Adjustments/Hue-Saturation

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Final Step, this is the magical fixing tool when things are too dark, set it to "colorize" in the bottom right corner, since we dont want to give it more color than the one it has already, set saturation to 0, then increase the light until you find the overall image to your liking

As a final note, you can use this feature to colorize with a blur layer without having to touch other important layers, very useful indeed.

Voila!, you have just gave your image some custom magic color!