How to ‘re-light’ your shots with the Color Efex Pro Darken/Lighten Center filter
06 Place Center and Center Size
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
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.
Brilliant Rod. Thank you so much for this.
I’d spent ages trying to darken a portrait background with Control Points and failing miserably !