Add Your Own Lighting
Steve Weinrebe
The perfect props aren't always available when shooting an interior, so furnishings and design elements can be added later in Photoshop. One of my favorite tricks is to add my own light fixtures into a scene, and blend the lighting in naturally.I photographed this Victorian setting that was originally lit only by the window at the rear. I later took pictures of a couple of light fixtures around my house and blended them into the room, then finished off with a Black & White adjustment layer.
Here are the steps to follow when adding light fixtures to a photographed scene.
Choose the right interior to work with
Step 1:
Choose a photograph of an interior setting that has a lot of shadowed areas, and ambiance from whatever lighting is there already. A scene shot with only window light, or light from one or two sources should work well. An interior flooded with light, or front lit from a flash, wouldn't be right for this technique. The photo below has plenty of shadow areas that can be lit up in Photoshop by adding light fixtures.
Add a photo of a light fixture
Step 2:
Find an appropriate fixture for whatever room scene you want to "light up", and take a picture of it at a similar angle to how it should appear in the room. I found a light fixture (in my laundry room of all places) that would be a good fit for this interior and snapped a photo of it. After taking your photo of an appropriate fixture, open it into Photoshop and create a selection mask. For this mask I used Photoshop CS3's Quick Selection tool. The Quick Selection tool actually learns what to select as you paint it into your image, so if the first pass at painting a selection with the tool isn't perfect, keep painting around the areas you want and, to de-select areas, paint while holding down the Option (Mac), or Alt (Windows) key on the unwanted portions.Then, position the two windows side by side and, using the Move tool, click on the selected light fixture and drag it into the interior scene, adding the light fixture as a new layer.
Step 3:
After converting the new light fixture layer to a Smart Object by right-mouse-clicking on the new "Layer 1", and choosing "Convert to Smart Object" from the contextual menu, press Command (Mac), or Control (Windows), + T, and Free Transform the light, holding down the Shift key while dragging from a corner to make the transform maintain the aspect ratio.
Shadow the Fixture
There are really just two giant steps to blend the light into the room. The first is to create a drop shadow for the light because, if you look at a light fixture mounted to a wall, you'll notice that it not only throws off light, but the light it throws off creates a slight shadow of the actual fixture against the wall. Since realism is our goal, let's do just that.
Step 4:
To achieve the giant steps we need to make a few baby steps. First, Command/Control-click on the fixture layer's thumbnail, in the Layers palette, to make a selection from the fixture photo on the layer.
Then apply a 10 pixel feather to the selection. Since this is a high resolution image, a 10 pixel feather isn't too much. Make a new layer below the fixture layer, by Command (Mac), or Control (Windows) - clicking on the "Create a new layer" button at the bottom of the Layers palette.
Then fill the selection with black on that new layer.
Tip: There are probably dozens of ways to make drop shadows in Photoshop, but I've found this method gives the most control and the most realistic shadows. Admittedly there are a few steps to this drop shadow exercise, but it works great.
Step 5:
A couple of reasons that I like to create drop shadows this way are that I can adjust the intensity of the shadow with the opacity slider of the shadow layer, and also that I can hide or reveal portions of the shadow by painting on a layer mask, which I've added to the shadow layer. By painting on the layer mask with black, using the paintbrush tool with a soft edged brush, we can smoothly paint the unnecessary portions of the shadow away, as in the figure below.
Cast the light
Now it's time to light the room up with our newly added light fixture. Again there are a few baby steps to make in order to achieve the giant step, and I find this method works great for this effect.
Step 6:
Use the Elliptical Marquee to make an oval selection around the floor beneath the ceiling light. Then, holding down the Shift key to add to the selection, do the same around the area of the ceiling where the light fixture has been placed.
Step 7:
With the elliptical selections active, press Command/Control + Option/Alt + D, to bring up the Feather dialog box. Give the selection a very large feather, 120 pixels for this image. Bear in mind, this is a high-res, 300 PPI image, so that's not too much feather here, while it would be if this were a 72 PPI web image.
Step 8:
Now to cast the light. Using a Curves adjustment layer, by dragging the curve upward, the tones within the two feathered selections are lightened creating the lighting effect on the Background layer. Be sure to place the Curves adjustment layer below the light fixture and fixture shadow layers, so that those don't get lightened as well.
Convert the image to Black-and-White
Step 9:
In this image the blue carpet, in my humble opinion, is not adding the most harmonious color, and lightening the shadowed portions of the carpet is revealing a magenta cast. But I've felt from the beginning that this scene would lend itself more to Black-and-White photography. Making the image Black-and-White will also take care of any color shift caused by the Curve. We can easily apply a Black & White adjustment layer, making sure that it is the top-most layer in the Layers palette by clicking the top layer (Layer 1 in the image above) to make that active, and then choosing "Black & White" from the adjustment layers drop-down menu at the bottom of the Layers palette (use Channel Mixer with "Monochrome" checked, in CS2 and earlier).
In the resulting Black & White adjustment's dialog box pictured above, by clicking and dragging the cursor on the blue carpet, to the right, some of the blue tones are lightened to add definition to the shadows.
Then click Tint to add a brownish, vintage looking, sepia tint to the image. The tint in this image is a bit much at the default 20% saturation, so drag the Saturation slider down to 10% for a less intense tint color.
For the finished image, below, I also photographed a wall fixture in my home and added it to the left and right walls of the photograph with the same technique I've described in the previous steps, using Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal to create the reversed fixture for the opposite wall. The result is a room transformed with the glow from newly added lights.
Steve Weinrebe:
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Photography © Steve Weinrebe, Getty Images
