How to Create Hard Light Effects in Photoshop

Here, you will learn on how to create hard light effects with a photo edit in Photoshop. I hope it will help you both the beginner and advanced level of students in a great deal.

Open an image that you want to work with which will be a background layer. From the adjustment layer below, select levels. To increase the brightness of the image, move the right slider to the left a bit of the layer. To add more contrast in the image, go to ‘Gradient Map’ from the adjustment layer below. Choose the color as black and white. Change the blending mode to soft light. Reduce the opacity into half. Adjust the Hue, Saturation and Lightness from the adjustment layer below. Again go to levels but this time move the mid slider to the left a bit of the layer.

Photo Courtesy – http://vibrant338.rssing.com/

Adjust the opacity, brightness and contrast which will suit your image. Now, create a new layer. Set the blending mode to lighten. Go to color picker now. Set the foreground color to red and background color as white. With the brush tool, when you click on certain area, you will get the red effect. Make two new layers. Set the blending mode to lighten in both of them. Now, go to ‘Color Lookup’ from the adjustment layer below. From there, you will set the file to ‘EdgyAmber’ effect. Reduce the opacity onto two third of 100 percent. Merge all these layers and change the blending mode from normal to soft light. Then go to Filter> Blur> Gaussian Blur from the above toolbar. Adjust it with your image. That sums up the whole process. One thing which is noticeable is that many people will do it differently.

I hope that it will help you and from now on, hopefully you will create more and more glowing effect images like this and be an expert in this field in the future.