Say you’ve taken a great shot of the sky on your holiday abroad. The cloud formation and lighting are perfect but somehow it lacks some dramatic accents and feels somewhat dull. In this tutorial you’ll learn to add those elusive atmospheric light rays (sunbeams). The Photoshop tutorial covers the Motion blur effect, blending modes and some basic image retouching.

What you’ll get:

Before

After

After – Light Version

1/4 Tweaking your shots – Light source

Open up your document and identify the area that is most likely to produce light rays. This is usually towards the light source. In the image we’ve got this is the top-left corner.

Lets make the light source easier to spot. Click the “Filters” menu/ “Render”/ Lighting Effects.

Keep in mind that you just have to accentuate the light-source and not burn the image. Set the light to Omni, the intensity to 2 or 3 and the ambiance to around 50 or so. Leave the rest at default. Click ok when you are satisfied. The settings are scene-dependent so you may have to play around a bit.

2/4 Isolate the Light Source

This is probably the most important part so, pay attention. Duplicate your cloud layer by dragging it to Photoshop’s New Layer {} icon or by right clicking it and hitting Duplicate Layer

With the duplicated layer selected, click the Image/ Adjustments menu and click Levels.

Drag the black arrow very close to the white one. This will increase the black level or your photo.

Select Photoshop’s Brush Tool {} and paint over the parts that we don’t need.

3/4 The light rays

Click the “Filters/ Blur” menu and select the Radial Blur entry

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