How to Create a Sun Flare Effect in Photoshop using Sleeklens Overlays

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  By Jordan Younce
How to Create a Sun Flare Effect in Photoshop using Sleeklens Overlays www.sleeklens.com

In this video, I will show you how to take the overlays that are supplied by Sleeklens and enhance the sun in your photos. You can get these overlays by clicking on the Photoshop Tabs > Photoshop Overlays and then choosing any of the available options which you can use to do light overlays, rain overlays and all kind of good stuff. Particularly, if you want the starburst effect, then you should check our starburst overlay.

I will show you how to use one or two of those overlays and enhance the sun that we have in our video. I like the image overall, but I want to enhance it a little bit and give more punch. The first I will do is to do the major edits to my image, but I already have done my edits before this tutorial just to make everything the way I wanted. All I will do is click on the overlay collections that I have from Sleeklens, and I will click on lighting> flares and from there I will see a couple of options including Grayscale flares and coloured flares as well. I will start with Grayscale ones, and I will first choose flare No 7, click on it and drag it into Photoshop. As you can see, it gives me the image which I can move around, and I will move it roughly to where the sun is and make it larger as well before click enter. I will then change the blending mode to screen as this takes away all the blacks and leaves the whites in the image. I can now better position the image over the sun.

This done, I will apply the photo filter by clicking the adjustment filter and then click the ‘Photo Filter’. I will then clip the photo filter to the overlay image by holding the ALT option on the keyboard, and the cursor will change into an area with a box next to it. The next thing we will do is click between the two areas, and it’s clipped to the flare image. What this does is that it allows me to put an adjustment on the flare and this only affects the flare. I will bump the flare density all the way to 100 and then choose another flare by going to Lighting > Flares > Color > Flare 7 futuristic and drag it into the image. I will then position the new overly roughly where the sun is and then change the blending mode screen. The reason why I choose the color one is that I did want a tiny hint of color and when I change it into the screen, the blue in the image kind of mimics and blends in with the surrounding and makes a sort of magenta tone. This worked very well.

It creates a flare that goes right over the horizon, and the one we made earlier gives a little bit of orange tint, making it look like it’s bursting through the waves. We will group the changes together to see our before and after by highlight them and then click Command/Ctrl +G in the keyboard. You can now see the image before and how the flares have enhanced the image and given it more punch. Now that I have them grouped, I can do “Ctrl + T’ to transform them and even make them bigger or smaller if I want to. I can do anything that I want to do with the overlays. The good thing with overlays from Sleeklens is that they allow you all kinds of controls to go ahead and get more punch to your images.

If you want to pick these overlays up, just click on the Photoshop tab and click on the Photoshop Overlays and you can pick the ‘Complete Photoshop Overlay’ which is a great deal or just choose the one that best works for you. You can also look out for more of our tutorials and other products for both Lightroom and Photoshop.

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Jordan Younce

I am a Real Estate and Landscape photography as well as a Graphic Designer based in North Carolina, USA. My passion for photography started with taking photos with a point-and-shoot and now I own a successful photography business. My goal is to help others learn the art of photography, develop their creative side and just have fun.

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