Photoshop Tutorial: Light Leaks, pt. 2

One of the coolest things about older cameras and toy cameras (such as holgas, dianas, lubitels and other gems) is that they have an element of unpredictability to them.

If you haven’t shot on a camera before, you have no idea if there are going to be holes (usually around the edge of the film) where your film is accidentally exposed to light when it shouldn’t be, causing little colored blurs or white streaks.

I showed you how to get white-blur light leaks in the last photoshop tutorial, so let’s focus on the colored bar leak today. (This poor flower! Getting all leaked on…)

Step 1. Press “Q” for Quickmask, “D” to reset your colors, “Backspace+Alt” to fill the Quickmask with color, “X” to switch your colors, then press “G” to select the Gradient tool.

Step 2. Select the Gradient tool that looks like a cylinder and make sure the “black to white” gradient preset is selected. Click in the middle of the image and drag just a little bit before letting to. This will create your leak bar.

Step 3. Press “Q” again to exit Quickmask, then create a Curves adjustment layer. Click the black bar in the middle and pull it up and to the left just a little bit. Select the red channel and pull it up about twice as far. Select the green channel and pull the line down just a little, as with blue.

Step 4. Press “G” for the Gradient tool again, change to the “black to transparent” preset, and select the linear gradient tool. Click on the layer mask of the Curves adjustment layer to select it, and draw a new very short gradient line inside the red bar, toward the middle. This will give one side of the bar strict definition, which we want.

Step 5. Draw another gradient in from the other side of the red bar, but start the gradient from a little ways away and don’t go very far into the bar. This will give this edge just a little less definition.

There you have it! Play with this one – you can change the shape all you want with the layer mask, and you can change the color all you want by adjusting the channels inside the curves layer seperately. Have fun leaking all your pictures up… I’ll show you how to fake film edges next!