Lighting effects are a versatile set of techniques that have recently come back into vogue in advertising and the fashion press. Lights and tracing motion effects can become part of the composition, adding brightness and motion to an image. They’re an excellent trick to have up your sleeve because of the fl exibility they offer and if you’ve got a few different methods in your toolbox, you can easily create a dense, detailed effect to use as a focal point, or simply add some subtle highlight touches to an existing traditional or digital illustration. Either way, with enough refi nement and practice, the end results of combining these techniques will benefi t almost any photograph or composition. In this tutorial, I’m going to look at (among other things) ways of bringing originality to digital lighting by introducing and vectoring traditional sketches, as well as examining some nifty Illustrator-based stroking techniques that achieve results with the greatest of ease. 01 Open Photoshop and import ‘soft.jpg’ from your CD. This wonderful image was captured by New York-based photographer Parris Whittingham, who’s been kind enough to share it with us to use for this tutorial. Be sure to head to http://pswhittingham.com and check out the rest of his fantastic portfolio. 02 The fi rst thing you’re going to do is carefully trace around the edges of the young man in the image using the Pen tool. Zoom in to around 300% and trace the outline carefully, a process commonly referred to as etching. Use as many anchor points as is necessary to get an accurate selection. 03 When you’re satisfi ed, rightclick on your completed outline and select Make Selection. Ensure that the Feather Radius is set to 0, Anti-aliased is on and the New Selection box is ticked. Copy and paste the selection into a new layer and name it ‘Etch’. 04 Defringing (Layer>Matting> Defringe) is a process I’m pedantic about because it gives etched layers a much smoother and cleaner feel, and it’s so easy to do that there’s no reason not to apply it every time. This layer should only require a 1-pixel defringe, but experiment to see what suits you.