LIGHTS EFFECT IN PSP7

Created March 7, 2002 © Copyright Moon's Designs
Property of Moon's Designs
This is my creation, any similarity to other tutorials on the Internet is unintentional.
Please do not copy or place this tutorial or any graphics to any other place without written permission directly from me. Thank you

 

I wrote this tutorial for my dear friend, and tutorial tester, Randie. Randie requested a tutorial on using the Lights Effect in the Illuminations feature in PSP7, she wanted it to go a step further than the other tutorials that are out there on the Internet. I was surprised as to how much I learned while investigating this feature. I am as guilty as the next person when it comes to "assuming" things about an effect, and I thank Randie for wanting to know more about this wonderful feature in PSP7.

This how-to tutorial is written in and for PSP Version 7.04 and assumes you have a working knowledge of PSP at an intermediate level.

JASC's PSP (30 day free trial)- You can get it HERE
A graphic to do your lighting with *smiles*

When Randie asked me to do this I grabbed the first graphic that came up in my browser in PSP, which just happened to be one of my finished images from my Frame In A Frame tutorial.

Lights is part of the Illumination Effect in PSP7. Use the Lights effects to have your image appear to be lit using up to five spotlights. Lights comes with several presets that you can use, or you can start with a preset effect and then edit its settings. You can edit the intensity, direction, color and if you want a particular spotlight used or not.

To access it go to Effects-->Illumination-->Lights and the following window will appear.

It will automatically load the last setting used. For this tutorial I selected the 4 corners preset and edited from there.

There are 5 spotlights that you can edit, I go into this in greater detail further down in the tutorial. There are several tutorials that use the lighting effect on a finished creation. I know that a lot of times people have a problem with applying the lights and having it show up the same way that the tut writer intended. I think I have solved the problem as to why this occurs. If a tutorial only shows the last setting for a lamp in her tutorial it more than likely will not turn out as the writer intended. It depends on what your last effect used was and each of the lamps need to be edited. Each lamp may be turned off, or on, and the settings adjusted specific to that particular lamp.

I have split up the different areas that can be edited and will tell you a little bit about each.

The drop down menu under Presets lists all of the Presets from JASC and any that you save.

Setting the darkness determines the darkness of the non-illuminated parts of your image. Increasing the value makes the area darker.

Select each lamp and edit how you want that light to appear. As you adjust different lamps you may wish to go back and readjust one you already have done. Trial and error seemed to work the best for me.

In the light source panel check On if you want the lamp on and uncheck it if you don't want a lamp there.

To choose the color for your light either left click to open the Color dialog box, or right click and you will get a selection of the most recent colors you have used.

Intensity sets the brightness for your spotlight, and direction as to where it will point.

Horizontal and Vertical numeric controls - Value of 0 is the center of the image. Positive numbers will move your light up and to the right, while negative numbers moves downward and to the left.

Smoothness determines the transition from the light to dark area at the edge of the cone. The edge is sharpest at the lower settings and as you increase the value, the transition becomes more gradual.

The Scale value indicates how large an area of the image the light covers.

The Cone Size determines the width of the light.

Asymmetry lengthens or shortens the light.

The reset button, under Asymmetry, will return all settings to the default program values. Press the <Shift> key while clicking and it will return the settings you had when you first opened the lights dialog box.

Instead of entering values in each section, you can click on the arm of each lamp. You can stretch the arms, shorten them, move the center focal point, adjust the light direction with the knob at the end of the center arm , change the cone size by moving the arms in and out, and reposition the light source by dragging the light spot.

I used the following settings for each lamp to get the effect that I desired.

For lamp1, I left the light source on and changed the color. I dragged the arm up to center it more in the corner of the frame.

Lamp2 with the light source on and the following is with it turned off.

On lamp3, I turned the light source off. The color shown is the default for that lamp.

The next two screenshots show you what the results would be with lamp4 on or off.

For lamp5 I used the arms and spread them out.

Once I had the settings the way I wanted, I clicked on the Save As, named my preset and clicked OK.

Your preset is saved with a .plh extension in your JASC PSP preset folder.

Then I thought I would see how it would look with the spotlight focusing on the flowers. I moved the spotlight and arms up to the flowers and dragged the handles down.

Of course, once I did this I just had to play around with the different arms to get the exact effect I wanted. Play to your hearts content to get the desired effect that you want on your creation.

 

I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial as much as I did creating it for you.