Day 11 - How to add Light Rays to a picture

What I did:
     Today, I learned how to add light rays to pictures. I added light rays to a picture of a forest. Normally, light rays can be found coming through the clouds giving the image a heavenly feel but I wanted to try a forest because it looks really cool. The pictures that I used are here.

Before:

After:

1. First, I changed my brush presets and also changed up some of the brush mechanics when going into the brush options. I added scattering and shape dynamics. I moved the scatter all the way up to 1000% so the brush would be scattered around instead of being one fluid entity.

2. Next, I used the brush technique that I learned in my dispersion effect posts to add the brushes that I was using. Then, I added the radial blur which gave the light ray effect to the image. It can be found in "filters" then into "blurs" and then finally into "radial blurs."

3. Next, added another layer of rays and lowered the opacity of the first layer of rays because it was far too strong and looked unrealistic to some degree. So I decided to lower the opacity to 20 for the first layer and then combine both rays into one layer. 

4. I changed the mode to color dodge to give it a more dramatic feel and added some hue saturation to finish off.

                           

What I learned:

So, in today's class, I learned a bunch of things about light rays. I learned a few things about brushes and also learned a bunch of things about radial blurs. I also learned some keyboard shortcuts.

Keyboard shortcuts:

Merging layers - "Ctrl" + "E"

New layer via copy - "Ctrl" + "J"

Hue and Saturation - "Ctrl" + "U"

I learned that the scattering option in the brushes menu really helps with spreading the particles apart. Moving the scattering bar changes how much scatter is applied to the image. 

The most important thing I learned today was the radial blur portion of my time spent in Photoshop. I learned that you can change up how the blur works, you can make it into a spiral form if you want or keep it in the zoom form. The spiral form isn't what I used because I needed a ray form so I ended up using the zoom form. Also, I learned that you can place your blur in a position where you need it so I could place the blur in the middle at the top because that's where the sun was coming from and it gives that look to it when I applied it.

and this what happened:

What I plan to learn tomorrow:

Tomorrow, I plan to learn how to add stars in Photoshop. I will be learning how to add stars to a picture which has no stars in it. At the moment, I am just trying to learn some new things about Photoshop and the thing is, I am running out of ideas. I want to continue photoshop until spring break and after spring break I will start Adobe After Effects and that will be a really refreshing thing to do because I've never used it before but for now, I will continue with Photoshop and tomorrow, I'll learn how to add stars.