A flare for photos
Create lens flare effects in Affinity Photo and master shapes, live filters and colour tools with James Paterson
Lens are is usually something photographers will take care to avoid. But, on the right image, it can enhance the mood. It’s ideal for travel and lifestyle photography, as what we lose in detail, we make up for in atmosphere. Of course, if you want natural ares then the best approach is to capture them in-camera by shooting into the sun.
But sometimes the effect is difficult to capture, or it can look too weak. In this photo here, there is a subtle lens are in the original image but it’s too weak to register properly. Whether you want to add to existing lens are like this or create it from scratch, then Anity Photo has a range of tools that can help you to achieve that effect.
Unlike Photoshop, there isn’t a dedicated lens are lter in Anity Photo. But it’s not difficult to create your own using the shape tool. Get to grips with a few shape, blur and blending tricks and you can quickly make realistic-looking ares to introduce into your photos. The effect will work better on some photos than others. It helps if the image is backlit, ideally with the sun in the frame as it is here, peeking out from behind Rome’s iconic Colosseum.
The great thing is that once we’ve created one circular are point, we can quickly duplicate, recolour, resize and reposition it elsewhere to build up the effect. Then, once completed, we can finish o the image by using a few tonal tricks to help bring everything together.
1 Blur a circle
Click and hold over the Shape tool and choose the Ellipse. Hold Shift and drag in the image to make a circle. In the Color panel, choose a yellow colour for the circle. Click the Live Filter icon in the Layers panel and choose Gaussian Blur. Increase Radius to adjust blur strength.
4 Copy and recolour
Duplicate the top ellipse layer with Cmd/ctrl+j then grab the Move tool and position elsewhere. Use the Color panel to tweak to another warm shade. Adjust the opacity of the layer to tone it down and set the blend mode to Screen to blend with the image below.
5 Build it up
Continue duplicating to build up the ares. Try turning o the child ellipse layer to make some ares more opaque. Keep the ares roughly along the same line, as this is how they would naturally appear. Next, grab the Double Star tool. Set Inner Radius 3%, Point Radius 100%, Points 7.
2 Make a child
Hit Cmd/ctrl+j to duplicate the ellipse, then go to the Layers panel and drag the copy on top of the other layer’s name to make it a child. Expand the layers and set the blend mode of the child ellipse layer to Erase. You will now see the beginnings of a halo eect.
6 Make a sunstar
Hold Cmd/ctrl-shift and drag from the sun to make a sunstar. Choose a colour, set the blend mode to Screen and add a Gaussian Blur live lter. Add a Levels adjustment layer and drag the Output Black Level inwards to fade the blacks. Add a Lens Filter layer for warmth.
3 Create a halo
Grab the Move tool, click and hold on the corner of the bounding box then hold Cmd/ctrl-shift and drag in to resize the second circle from the centre, making it smaller than the rst. Adjust the layers’ Gaussian Blur by double-clicking the live lter layer to ne-tune the halo.