How to enhance and create gorgeous light rays in your landscapes in Photoshop

We’ve all been there, we see a gorgeous beautifully lit scene before us while we’re out with friends or family, but we don’t have our camera with us. So, we go back… every day.. for a month… and nothing. No matter how often we may return to a location to try and recreate that day, the light just doesn’t play as nicely as we’d like.

Well, Jimmy McIntyre’s here to save the day and show us how to use Photoshop to create those gorgeous light rays that didn’t quite make it back to the landscape in front of our camera.

It’s interesting to see frequency separation being used on landscapes, used in the video to remove a lens flare from the sun. The Healing Brush Tool would typically be my go-to for this sort of thing, but frequency separation should help things be a little more consistent and predictable.

Jimmy does use the Raya Pro addon for Photoshop to perform some tasks, such as frequency separation creating luminosity masks, but there are other methods out there that don’t require third party tools.

As well as adding the light Rays, Jimmy goes through the Orton Effect, creating an overall glowy and dreamy look to the image. You can see how to do this in one of Jimmy’s past tutorials, but it has a great effect on this particular scene.

Should we strive to keep going back to the same location day after day for months on end, waiting for the scene before us to match what’s in our head? Or is it ok to give nature a little nudge in Photoshop sometimes? Let us know what you think in the comments.

[via ISO1200]