Shading in Photoshop: Brushing Shining Effects

Tutorial for brushing shining effects with photoshop.

It is time for final adjustments to their metallic effects. Let's go over the edges of the main forms of metal: an effect of light and flowers of light. The idea is to use reflection as a bright chrome, bright as special effects for the 3D shader brush.

First, to maintain their shadows and lighting effects to a new level, everyone is a good idea. This way, you can mix the plane, and the opacity and thus adjust the intensity of extra-brushed shadows and lights. Used to create the key combination Ctrl + Shift + N a new layer in Photoshop.

Lighting

Let's start with the lighting and highlights. To create a real looking metal effect in Photoshop, you have brush a glowing aura near the spots of maximum highlight. That's nearly how the metallic glow and bloom effects work.

To brush a shining edge effect, select the Photoshop Brush Tool (shortcut: B) and pick a big and soft brush through the brush menu or by right clicking anywhere on the canvas while you have a brush selected.

Hold Shift while brushing to create horizontal and vertical strokes. Press Shift + Click to brush straight lines. That's a good idea to remark the shining edges of metallical pieces with a precise and industrial look.

Set the blending mode of the layer with these lighting effects to Screen. Screen increases the light value of the layers below, so it acts as a lighting source, always making the underlying image brighter. That's why screen is the best blending mode to create highlight effects in Photoshop.

The most appropriate color to create metallic highlight effects should be nearly white. Take into account that darker colors haven't nearly any affect in screen mode. Nevertheless, pure white may be too intense, leading to an overexposed result that may not admit further color adjustments. If your source of lighting has any tone, you can add a little bit of extra color and saturation to your layer of highlights (such as a soft yellow for a sunlit metal, and so on).

Shading

You can use a similar technique to increase the strength of the shading effects. Select a soft brush and start painting on those dark areas whose contrast you want to increase.

I would pick a slightly harder and bigger brush than the one used for the lighting effects, with a dark grey color to increase the strength of the shadows.

The blending mode of this layer used for shading purposes should be set to Multiply. The multiply mode always darkens the underlying layers by mixing them with the brushed color. In fact, multiply is just the opposite of screen (that's why the screen blending mode was formerly known as "divide" in older Photoshop versions, as it is actually the inverse operation of multiply).

Now let's see a nearly automated procedure to create light glow effects, and a trick to make the metallic lighting effects more realistic.

Need pictures? See this link. I got source from this.