Add fake lights with CC Light Rays

Hey there, in this video we're going to look at faking some lights to try and make this parallax image that we’ve done, to make it look a bit more believable, or cheap and nasty, depending on how far you go with this exercise.

So, I'm going to twirl this all up so it all looks nice and neat. If you haven't got this file here you can download it from the production files, or exercise files. And that is in-- jump to the website, and download the production files, and you can grab this one. Otherwise, you can use it for any video, it doesn't have to be a parallax. Just see this one here, we've got this parallax thing where the sky is moving differently from the background. And do I like it? It's okay. But adding the lights to it, it's pretty easy to do.

We're going to first of all, add an 'Adjustment Layer' because it's always supposed to add it to this layer rather than straight to any of these layers here. It's easy to do 'Adjustment Layer'. I'm going to rename it. Instead of 'Adjustment Layer' I'm going to call this one 'Lights'. I'm going to use the one in here, so 'Effects Panel'. 'Effects & Presets', type in 'cc light', and you find 'CC Light Rays'. We want to click, hold, and drag it. And drag it on to the lights. Need this little dot here.

This thing here can be moved, and you'll see, when you move it you can decide, you can put in a glint on that rusty old car, which is unlikely. I'm going to put that into the trees. I think the Sun's actually behind this, in that cloud photograph, but you can't see it in the sky. We're going to fake it, let's pretend it's just behind here, just about to come out from this little bit.

In terms of the intensity, you can play around with how intense it is. So you can have this thing-- watch when it moves. Whoah! Hitting space bar to get it to preview. It's probably not much. That's the big man coming down, visiting his old car. We want it a little bit more just subtle. I'm not going to say subtle, I'm going to overdo it. It's like finding the-- running it in the Lens Flare in Photoshop. When I first found that, I overused it. You're probably going to end up doing the same thing with this.

You see the light behind there? So, if you're using a different image through the tree is really great because there's a lot of texture in there. So it's sparkling all these lights. You can play around with the 'Radius'. What kind of lights come through. That will be like a crystal ball type thing. So I'm going to 'undo' that. You can play around with a few of these different options, but what you can do, say if it's not really-- it's coming out, but it's not so very exciting, what we can do is animate the center all the time, to fake it, and move it along.

Say I want it to come off this. It's working, it's doing okay but I'm going to get it to-- I'm going to turn down the-- not so good. But I'm going to get it to move because at the moment the center is moving off into the trees, I want it to follow the car. So I'm going to start it here. I'm going to set a key frame for the center, and after this time, I'm going to drag it down here. You'll notice that I’ve got a key frame. If I twirl this down, actually I hit you to give me my key frames. There's one there, and one there. It just means that it's moving. Just clicking on the car.

This is the opposite of what I wanted to do. It's a bit slow now, so I'm going to do the opposite. Instead of moving along with the car, I'm going to get it to move-- give me that guy. I'm going to move it kind of along here. Just kind of sparkle as it goes along. You might have to move the centers to kick it into gear, and make sure it's moving, otherwise, like Dan, just sitting over there, and not doing anything. Still not doing a huge amount. But, that's it. Light rays, nice and easy, nice simple way to add a little bit of subtle effects. You can crank it right up, and make it not subtle but that's 'CC Light Rays'. Let's hit 'Save'. Let's go to the next video.