Add a Dramatic Effect to Ordinary Photos

In this tutorial you are going to learn how to add a dramatic effect to your ordinary photos using Photoshop. This is a great tutorial to learn, because you will be able to make your photos look a lot more dramatic and more appealing to the eye. You can apply this to any image that you wish to be more dramatic.

To start off with, you are going to need some basic knowledge of Photoshop. You need to know how to navigate freely and how to use some of the filters and tools within Photoshop. If you don't know how to use Photoshop, or are just learning, I suggest that you visit Tutorials4You to get started out right.

Ok, let's begin with our tutorial on how to add a dramatic effect to your photos.

Step One. The first thing that you need to do is to choose a photo that you want to apply the effect o. I usually go with a photo that is meant to be a portrait or of flowers, or something like that. That is just my style though. You can choose any photo that you wish.

Step Two. Now that you have your photo open in Photoshop, the first thing that you need to do is to duplicate your background layer. You can do that easily by pressing Ctrl+J on your keyboard.

Step Three. Next, you need to go to the filter menu, down to Blur, and over to Gaussian Blur. This will open the Gaussian Blur window. Inside of that window you need to set the Radius to 5 and click OK to close the window.

Step Four. Now go back up to the Filter menu, down to Render, and over to Lighting Effects. This will open the Lighting Effects window. Inside of that window you need to change the style to Flashlight, and move the light source right on top of the main portion of the image. You can do this by using the window to the left inside of the Lighting Effects window. You can also increase or decrease the size inside of that same window. You also want to use the Intensity slider to go to 50, and click OK to close the window.