by Melissa Raissa

Created on: October 28, 2010

Photo glare or flare effects provide a dramatic depiction of bright lights. These are useful for photos with celestial subjects such as the sun, stars and space as well as photos that focus on light. Although they’re not ideal for certain types of photography such as portraits, they are, however, perfect effects for scenic photography.

Choosing An Image

A photo that has glare but no definitive light source is often considered an anomaly and therefore, an undesirable effect. Choose images that have subjects with inherently bright qualities in them such as a fully, visible sun during the day or lamp posts during the night. The flare effect has to be predictable for it to look natural on your photo.

Adding Flare Effects To A Photo Image

Open your image with the GIMP software. You may add a new, transparent layer over your original photo to keep the effect separate from the image itself. This will be helpful especially if you’re going to do several trials of the effect. That way, you don't have to keep using the Undo command, you just toggle the Visibility button at the Layers dock to see which of the effects you’d like to use for the final image.

After adding the transparent layer, click FILTERS->LIGHT AND SHADOW->GRADIENT FLARE at the menu bar. Under the Selector tab of the Gradient Flare dialog, you will find several options for the type of glare that you want. The Default options is the most common out of all the options but there are those that can help you achieve a particular effect such as Hidden Planet for eclipse-like effects or Distant Sun which uses hexagonal instead of circular-shaped flare.

At the Settings tab, you can adjust the properties of your flare including its position in the photo, its radius, hue, vector angle, vector length and distribution. Under the Center section of the Settings tab, you can adjust the placement of the brightest part of the flare by changing the X and Y settings. The Parameters section helps in adjusting the direction of the flare as well as the scope, color, and rotation. The latter setting is more applicable to non-circular flare such as those of the Distant Sun.

Creating Custom Flare Effects

You can also add your own versions of flare effects at the Selector Tab of the Gradient Flare dialog. You can either create a New flare or Copy an existing flare and then modify it. This will open the Gradient Flare Editor dialog which has four tabs namely General, Glow, Rays and Second Flares. The last three tabs basically represent the different layers used in creating the flare while the General tab allows you to adjust the Opacity and Paint mode of each of the three layers.

The Gradient Flare Editor has a plenty of options for creating custom flares. You can change the shapes, colors, distribution and much more. You can find a more detailed discussion regarding the Gradient Flare Editor at GIMP’s online documentation. But once you become familiar with this feature, you’ll find that creating your own flare is quite easy and you don’t really need to change a lot of things to create the type of effect that you want given the preset options provided by GIMP.

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