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How to ‘re-light’ your shots with the Color Efex Pro Darken/Lighten Center filter

October 24, 2013 by Rod Lawton

06 Place Center and Center Size

Color Efex Pro Darken/Lighten Center filter

This time, I’ve moved the centre of the effect to a point near the bottom right corner of the basket and increased the Center Size value to maximum to create the appearance of a larger light source.

07 The finished picture

Color Efex Pro Darken/Lighten Center filter

I think this ‘re-lighting’ effect has been very effective. In reality, the Darken/Lighten Center filter is just a highly controllable vignette effect, but it does the job perfectly well.

You can use the same principle in other programs. In Elements, for example, you could create an adjustment layer to darken the outside of the picture and use a radial gradient layer mask to protect the centre. What I like about Color Efex Pro, though, is that it makes adjustments like this feel intuitive and ‘photographic’ rather than technical.

See also

More Color Efex Pro tutorials

Related

Pages: Page 1 Page 2 Page 3

Filed Under: Nik Collection, Tutorials

Life after Photoshop is owned and run by photographer and journalist Rod Lawton. Rod has been a photography journalist for nearly 40 years, starting out in film (obviously) but then migrating to digital. He has worked as a freelance journalist, technique editor and channel editor, and is now Group Reviews Editor on Digital Camera World. Life after Photoshop is a personal project started in 2013.

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