Create lens flare effects from scratch in Affinity Photo and master shapes, Live Filters and colour tools with James Paterson
BEFORE
AFTER
Lens flare is usually an element that photographers will take care to avoid. But on the right image, it can enhance the mood. It’s ideal for travel, portraiture and lifestyle photography, as what we lose in detail, we make up for in atmosphere. Of course, if you want natural flares then the best approach is to capture them in-camera by shooting into the sun. But sometimes the effect is difficult to capture, or it can look too weak. In this photo here, there is a subtle lens flare in the original image but it’s too weak to register properly. Whether you want to add to existing lens flare like this or create it from scratch, then Affinity Photo has a range of tools that can help.
Unlike Photoshop, there isn’t a dedicated lens flare filter in Affinity Photo. But it’s not difficult to create your own. Get to grips with a few shape, blur and blending tricks and you can quickly make realistic-looking flares in no time. The effect will work better on some photos than others. It helps if the image is backlit, ideally with the sun in the frame as it is here peeking out in our Rome.jpg start image. The great thing is that once we’ve created one circular flare point, we can quickly duplicate, recolour, resize and reposition it elsewhere to build up the effect. Then once done, we can finish off with a few tonal tricks to help bring everything together.
DOWNLOAD PROJECT FILES TO YOUR COMPUTER FROM: http://downloads. photoplusmag.com/pp217.zip
STEP BY STEP FLARE EFFECTS
01 BLUR A CIRCLE
Click and hold over the Shape tool and choose the Ellipse. Hold Shift and drag in the image to make a circle. Go to the colour panel and choose a yellow colour for the circle. Click the Live Filter icon in the Layers Panel and choose Gaussian Blur.
02 MAKE A ‘CHILD’
Hit Cmd/Ctrl+J to duplicate the ellipse, then go to the Layers panel and drag the copy on top of the other layer’s name to make it a child. Expand the layers and set the blend mode of the child ellipse layer to Erase. You’ll see the beginnings of a halo effect.
You can quickly duplicate shapes, layers and almost any other item by holding Alt and dragging it with the Move too
