Vikki Olds

November 1, 2000

Paint Shop Pro 7 is now capable of many, many types of lighting. For this tutorial I'll be using the sunset lights and a couple of the other image editing tools available in Paint Shop Pro 7.

Above is the original image taken in Cabo San Lucas Mexico. This is an interesting rock formation and I thought I could get a surreal night time image out of it with the use of Paint Shop Pro 7's lighting effect.

It looked kind of plain without any clouds so using Paint Shop Pro 7's Picture Tube tool and the Cloud preset I added a layer of clouds.

Next, I added the Lights effect, Sunset. You can access this effect from Effects>Illumination Effects>Lights. This is a new effect added to Paint Shop Pro in version 7. As you can see there are many options that are adjustable to get just the right effect. I left the default color but adjusted the Direction(70) and Intensity(30). I also adjusted the Cone size. The default is full. As you can see in the screenshot below there are other lights in the image and you can adjust those separately if you wish. I left them where they were. When the Lights dialog first opens the sun was towards the top of my image so I moved it down to where you see it now.

With all your options set, click ok. The resulting image is below.

I supposed I could have stopped with that but it looked a little yellow to me and I like a nice violet red sunset. To get the color I wanted I opened the Color adjustments menu...Color>Adjust>Red/Green/Blue.

You can see my settings in the screenshot below. To remove most of the yellow I decreased the green and increased the blue. When I did that I had quite a but too much red so I needed to reduce it also.

Below is the resulting image after clicking ok.

That's an ok image but now it feels a little cold to me and not quite right so I decided to balance the color a little.

After adding a little warmth to my image I ended up with the image below.

Now I like that one. So it was complete. But what about a sunrise image? From the Colors menu...Color>Histogram>Stretch I stretched the colors a bit and ended up with the image below.

Now I have three images from one that are sort of surreal just by using the included tools available in Paint Shop Pro 7.

Copyright 2000, Vikki Olds, All Rights Reserved