Source: Gannon Burgett
Sometimes it can be hard enough to time the perfect golden hour portrait. What can be even more challenging is to perfectly capture the sun as it’s quickly falling on the horizon.
If you happen to miss it though, don’t fret. The Photoshop gurus over at Phlearn have shared a helpful tutorial showing how you can add your very own sunset effect in Lightroom with a few extra layers and clipping masks.
To detail the process, Aaron Nace of Phlearn breaks down the process step by step. First, you must create an artificial sun in the background using a radial gradient. Once you’ve created that in its own layer, you then make a clipping mask of the layer before making a few adjustments to size and blending mode.
Once the sun is set in place, it’s time to match the color balance of the rest of the image using Photoshop’s integrated color balance tool. Once those steps are finished, it’s just a matter of tweaking the image to taste.
It’s a fun and effective way to add an extra little pop to your photos when they need a little something extra.