Knoll Light Factory : Photoshop Lighting Effects

Global options for your Photoshop lighting effects.

There are two sections of global controls in Knoll Light Factory for your Photoshop lighting effects. Both appear beneath the Preview Window. The Master Controls affects the flare's global settings. The Layer Options affect how your flare layer interacts with other Photoshop layers.

The Master Controls.

The Master Controls are a Brightness slider, Scale slider and Color swatch. These options control the global appearance of your lighting effect.

The Brightness slider controls the lighting effect's brightness. Surprise! The higher the value, the brighter the light elements. Scale adjusts the size of the elements. The higher the value, the larger the elements. The Color swatch sets a color for the flare light source using its hue and saturation values.

Add randomness to light.

Also in the Master Controls is a new Randomness feature. The Randomness slider accomplishes a few different states of chaos between certain numerical values.

Simply drag the slider or type in a value. Then hit the Randomize button, and watch the fun start! It’s a great to make really cool presets very easily. Our Laser Light tutorial uses this feature extensively.

The Layer Options.

The Layer Options consist of three popup menus and a checkbox. Tint Layer, Obscuration Layer, View and Invert all control how your lighting effects interact with your Photoshop file.

Tint Layer is used to load in another layer from your Photoshop. Color information from this layer is added to the color of the flare elements to blend a new color palette for the lighting effect.

The View popup provides different viewing modes for the Preview Window. For instance, preview your flare against black or against the Photoshop layer you're applying it to.

Obscuration Layer chooses a layer in the Photoshop project that will obscure or hide the flare. This makes the light realistically appear to pass behind objects in another layer. It can also simulate light bloom. The Invert checkbox will switch the alpha mode of the Obscuration Layer.