ad using soft lighting effect

image before use soft lighting effect

Hi everyone, today I’ll show you how to create a soft lighting effect. This effect is usually used to create a studio product shoot, but in this case, we’ll just use photoshop to create a similar effect, instead of actually setting up the lights in an actual studio.

1. press W, to select magic wand tool

2. Shift + click on the white background, to add the parts of the white background to the selection

3. press L, and keeping pressing Shift + L, till you have selected the correct lasso tool, in this case, the polygonal lasso tool

4. press Alt, and click on different points of the image, to remove remove current selection

note: for our image, the magic wand tool selected too much, so we press Alt, while creating selection with polygonal lasso tool, to use new selection to remove from previous selection

5. press Q, to enter quick mask mode

6. press R, to select Smudge tool

7. click and drag along the new edge of the selection created with the polygonal lasso tool, to ’smudge’ the selection, so the edge created by the polygonal lasso tool, will not be as straight, so it’ll look more curved

8. press Q again, to return to standard mode

9. press Shift + Ctrl + I, to invert current selection (so everything, except background is selected)

10. select File > New, and select preset of 640 x 480, and click OK

11. click foreground color, and select dark blue color, eg. R: 50, G: 60, B: 70

12. press Alt + Backspace, to fill current layer or its selection, with current foreground color

13. select file containing product image

14. press V, to select Move tool

15. click and drag selection of image to new document (the one with width and height of 640 and 480, respectively), and click and drag image selection of the product to the right center of the document

16. select Background layer

17. click Create New layer button

18. press X, to switch foreground and background color, so foreground color should now be white

19. press L, and keep pressing Shift + L, till you have selected Lasso tool

20. click and drag a ‘loose’ selection around the product

21. press Alt + Backspace, to fill current selection with current foreground color, in this case, white

22. press Ctrl + D, to drop current selection

23. select Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur, and enter radius of 40 (use a large radius value to create a VERY blurred image)

24. change opacity of current layer to 70%, to reduce intensity of the ‘lighting’

25. click Create New Layer button

26. press B, to select brush tool

27. click Brush picker, and select a soft medium-sized brush, eg. soft 35-pixel

28. click and drag along the bottom edge of the product, to create the ’shadow’

29. change opacity of current layer to 40%, to reduce the intensity of the ’shadow’

note: you can create a simple ad with this effect, by adding some text and lines, as shown in the first image of this tutorial