Veiling lens flare in post-production

[AAz01]

Photoshop filters or tips on how to achieve it manually in PP?

I'm looking for a lens-flare to cover the entire canvas, but without circular artifacts. Something along these lines:

http://www.katemacpherson.com/wp-content/uploads/2...

http://photographylife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014...

[The_Jackal]

The simplest way would just be a large soft white brush using a soft light blend mode. Then adjust opacity and colour to suit.
Google free lens flare textures for some actual textures to overlay, or there are actions to do it as well.
As usual a search on YouTube will show you lots of tutorials. Sometimes they use the word haze these days as well for this kind of thing.

[Morbid]

There is a filter for this in PS.

Filters/Render/Lens Flare

[Simpo Two]

So you don't mean veiling (covering up), you mean adding.

[andy-xr]

You can get flare brushes as a free download from a lot of places, just remember to change the colour as if you're trying to put fake flare in, it's never white, always has some yellow or orange in there. When you find a brush you like, set it to hard, make it big, have it on it's own layer and blur it a lot. Then set the layer to soft light

One thing to note though, dont have 2 suns. If the light upfront on the subject is obviously sunlight, having sun flare in the background can ruin the photo

You can obviously shoot to include flare, I personally love backlit shots over exposed

[flat-planedCrank]

All depends on the photo of course...

If it's a dull day and there's a large soft flare it may look a bit strange. The other option is simulating something like 'light leaks' you get from low quality / old cameras. E.g. http://blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/freebies/free-ligh...

For a soft flare you can try a simple effect like:
- Copy the photo layer
- Menu: Image > Adjustments > Threshold
- Adjust the slider to select the 'highlights' of your image. Press OK.
- Menu: Filter > Blurs > Gaussian Blur
- Set the blur value to the softness required.
- Change blending mode to Screen, opacity around 10-20%?

Something like that will give you a flare-like softness. Could also add some colours to the edges of the blur, and so on...


That the sort of thing you were after?

[King Cnut]

OP.

As stated above, you can use the render filters in PS. But I don't think that's what the photographers in your examples did, they were shot into the sun and the effects are 'natural' (but maybe exaggerated later in PS). A filter couldn't produce the translucent backlit hair effects.

Personally, I don't think falsifying 'natural' effects of light/lens in PS works. Much better to try and squeeze something special out of the existing light - whatever it is...