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Lens flare is usually something photographers will take care to avoid. But, on the right image, it can enhance the mood. It’s ideal for travel and lifestyle photography, as what we lose in detail, we make up for in atmosphere. Of course, if you want natural flares then the best approach is to capture them in-camera by shooting into the sun.
But sometimes the effect is difficult to capture, or it can look too weak. In this photo here, there is a subtle lens flare in the original image but it’s too weak to register properly. Whether you want to add to existing lens flare like this or create it from scratch, then Affinity Photo has a range of tools that can help you to achieve that effect.
Unlike Photoshop, there isn’t a dedicated lens flare filter in Affinity Photo. But it’s not difficult to create your own using the shape tool. Get to grips with a few shape, blur and blending tricks and you can quickly make realistic-looking flares to introduce into your photos. The effect will work better on some photos than others. It helps if the image is backlit, ideally with the sun in the frame as it is here, peeking out from behind Rome’s iconic Colosseum.
The great thing is that once we’ve created one circular flare point, we can quickly duplicate, recolour, resize and reposition it elsewhere to build up the effect. Then, once completed, we can finish off the image by using a few tonal tricks to help bring everything together.
Download the project file(s) to your Downloads folder
