Understanding Textures & Lighting

Textures and the Lighting Effects filter can make an image jump right off the page or screen. Using a texture to create 3D, however, is a scary thing for most Photoshop users. We'll take some of the mystery out of the process.

The easiest way to add texture with the Lighting Effects filter is to use one of the image's existing channels to create a surface texture. This results in an image that appears to have been painted onto a surface. Figure 1 shows our test image, which can be found in the Samples folder installed with Photoshop 6.

To create a channel to use as a texture, simply drag one of the existing color channels to the New Channel button at the bottom of the Channels palette. (Remember that the composite channel called RGB is not actually a channel, and so cannot be duplicated.)

Using the menu command Filter> Render> Lighting Effects opens the dialog box shown in Figure 2. Note that, at the bottom, Red Copy has been chosen as the texture channel.

The Result is shown in Figure 3.

Since photographs already have shadows and highlights naturally, adding them with the Lighting Effects filter is generally unnecessary. The filter can, however, be used to emphasize them.

Duplicate a channel to use as the texture, then roughly paint the highlights and shadows you desire, as shown in Figure 4. Using the principles explained in the previous column, white a will create highlights and neutral gray represents no change.

This creates a mask that can be viewed as an overlay by restoring the visibility of the RGB composite channel. It will appear as a normal Alpha channel (Figure 5).

To prevent the filter from being applied too harshly, blur the rough mask. In this case, I used the Magic Wand to select the background, used the command Select> Inverse, and then applied a Gaussian Blur of 5 pixels. The result is seen in Figure 6.

The selection was maintained, applying the Lighting Effect to only the foreground subject. Figure 7 shows the effect.

Six shooters

When installing Photoshop 6, you may need to swap CDs and insert the disk from your previous version. Make sure to use the Eject button in the Installer window. If it is grayed out, click once on the Photoshop 6 CD to select it. This has generated a very large column of requests for assistance. The vote here is for Adobe to, in the future, go back to simply typing in the old serial number.

Make sure that no other programs are running during installation, especially your Web browser. Installers should always run alone, whether on Mac or Windows, for best results. In this case, it's very important that the Web browser be shut down to allow for proper installation of the SVG Viewer plug-in. Additionally, this seems to cause some problems with the installation of Adobe OnLine.