[Music Playing]
Now for this lesson on render effects or filters from the render sub menu I am just going to leave this image open. Now what I am going to do here is create a new blank layer and I am going to hit the letter D to make sure that black is my default for ground color. I am going to hit alt-delete on the mac or alt-backspace on the PC to fill this layer with black.
I am going to go back up to the filter menu and under the render sub menu I am going to select lens flare. Now the render sub menu is actually pretty cool, we use the render sub menu to cerate stuff from scratch. So often time when you have clouds or fibers for example as we look at you do not have to have anything else on the screen you just basically have to have a blank document. So where as a lot of other filters are only cool like cut out for example, pretty much only cool if you have a great photo to work with. Where as the render filters can create beautiful stuff from scratch, case and point lens flare.
Click on lens flare and the lens flare effect attempts to mimic the reflection that a camera often has when it has a big strong light source like the sun in its frame. Lens flares are actually becoming a very popular design element as well but because they are so cool, they are often over used. So, use lens flares with tact and moderation. Just going to go ahead, use the default settings here, and hit okay, and here we have our lens flare big, bright, and beautiful. But, the problem is, is that we want our lens flare to show up on our back ground here. So, to fix this and to make our lens flare show up on the layer beneath we are going to call in the help of a layer blend mode. Making sure that layer one is selected in the layers pallet, we are going to go to this drop down again and I am going to select screen. And there we have our lens flare, we are going to hit the letter V for the move tool, I can move this lens flare around here. And this will probably look better if the image beneath it was not all pond reapply but you get the idea.
So, we can make, if you have a hero with a sword in his hand this little gleam right would be absolutely spectacular there, a really nice touch to an image like that. We will delete this lens flare and we are going to make another new blank layer and let us try some other render effects here. I am going to go the filter menu and then render and I am going to render clouds. Now watch this, clouds renders clouds. It uses your fore ground and back ground colors to just randomly generate a cloudy type pattern.
Added space this is phase this is not very useful it is not very believable for cloud effects. But, the power is not in the cloud the power is what you can do with it. What if we went up to here to filter, distort and went up to pull our coordinates. Well then we will have this interesting typhoon looking thing. Maybe if we adjust the de-luminance values we can make this look like a flower, who knows? But, it is a great jumping off point for other effects. I am going to hit command Z or command alt Z to undo that, now I am going to go to filter, render, fibers, this is another great render effect that generates stuff from scratch, however, sometimes you will see this little warning dialogue box. It cannot complete the fibers command because this selected area is empty.
So where as with clouds we do not need pixels there, it will generate those pixels automatically. With fibers we do need something there but anything will work. So I am just going to select the layer, make sure it is selected and hit alt delete or alt backspace to fill it with the fore ground color. Now let us go back up to filter, render, and fibers. This creates this kind of fibers, they kind of look like carpet fibers and this is actually a really useful effect. You might be saying well I do not do that much carpet art but it is actually a lot more helpful than just that.
If we take down variance a little bit and let us go ahead and take up strength a little bit so we increase the amount of fibers here. That looks pretty good. Let us go a head and hit okay. Now if we were to tint this red and maybe adjust the levels a little bit we have this really gory, grungy, bloody look to it that we can maybe use for a horror movie or something equally scary. Like wise, if we went down here to the adjustment layers, now we have not talked about adjustment layers yet, do not fret though we have a lesson that contains a lot of information on adjustment layers a little bit later on in this series.
For now I am just going to hit this half black, half white circle at the bottom of the layers pallet, I am going to select hue saturation. You could also select the brand new black and white filter to do this as well. Go to select saturation, I am going to select colorize and now we can play around with the hue values. Maybe let us saturate this a little bit, take down the lightness. And we can create a pretty natural looking wood texture from scratch. How long did it take me to do that? What, two seconds two steps. All you have to do is apply fibers and then apply a very simple colorizing layer. We have what is pretty much a believable wooden texture. We could light this, we could do any one of a number of things to make it even more believable, but as it stands that could be a great little background.
So again the render filters are great for creating stuff out of the blue and they especially work well if you are trying to create a jumping off point. They are usually not an end but a means to and end. And now let us conclude this amazing lesson on filters by talking about how to use filters together in really interesting and creative ways.
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