With Light Artefacts by Martins Ribeiro, you can create dazzling new images and enhance existing ones, with 70 spectacular overlays of real light effects to choose from.
Supplied in JPG and .afassets format, the pack also comes with a PDF containing a preview of all the images and brief instructions on use.
Let’s take a look at this incredibly useful and powerful overlay pack in more detail and explore some ideas to use these overlays to the best effect.
Experiment with Blend Modes
It’s definitely worth applying and experimenting with blend modes on the overlays over your base images, as you can get all sorts of different effects. Use the overlays with Screen blend mode or Hard Light for see through effects, or invert them and use with Multiply blend mode. You can even add colour by using a fill layer and blending it to hue for a stronger effect.
You could also try layering multiple overlays with different blend modes applied too.
Add colour
To add one colour, you can use a Recolour Adjustment directly over the overlay and change the opacity to taste. You could also change the blend mode to Hue for a more subtle effect.
If you need to add several colours, create a geometric shape and fill it with a gradient. Using a geometric shape instead of a pixel layer will keep the gradient editable if you need to change it later. You could also blend to the colour or hue.
Use the overlays as masks
You can convert the overlays to masks (Layer> Rasterise to Mask), which enables you to get the effect shown below.
You can also use the overlays as luminosity masks for Adjustment Layers, allowing you to create several different effects. Convert the image to a mask (Layer> Rasterise To Mask) and use it on your images. You can also clip Adjustment Layers to masks to get different effects.
Customise the shapes
If the shapes in the overlays are not quite what you were looking for, for your composition, you can edit them to create exactly what you need. Start with an overlay that has the shape closest to what you want, and use Filters> Deform to add points and manipulate the shape to your liking. You can also cut and paste parts of different overlays to create new effects.
Build up your image with multiple overlays
By using multiple overlays, you can create unlimited effects in your compositions. Add in the techniques discussed in this article like Blend modes, Layer Effects, Masks and Adjustments Layers, and the possibilities really are endless.
Make the overlay the focus of your composition
You can also use the shapes in the overlays as the main focus of your compositions. Try using the Screen blend mode on an overlay and clipping a Recolour Adjustment to the layer to get the effect shown below.
What’s included:
- 70 images (6,500 pixels wide) of real light, supplied in .afassets and JPG format
- A PDF containing a preview of all the images and brief instructions on use
Please note: the .afassets supplied in this pack will only work in 1.9+ versions of Affinity apps.
Get this add-on for Affinity and many others in the Affinity Store.