16 million color Lighting Effect Drawing:

There are 2 methods of adding lighting here, large and small lighting effects. Both of these methods are very simple, and after you learn them, you can advance it with your own talents.

light1.gif (3400 bytes)The 1st way:
1. I want to add lighting coming down the chest from that white dot on the neck armor.

light2.gif (2304 bytes)2. First I cut the area I DO NOT want to have any lighting effects on. In this case it is the area along the edges of the light. This gives the effect of the light pointing down. You don't have to do this if you want a full circle of lighting.
(This is it's own image, do not save this over your original)

light3.gif (3346 bytes)3. I used the Retouch on lighten size 40 here. I placed my pointer on the white dot, and clicked a few times till I got the right amount.

light4.gif (3066 bytes)4. Now I just pasted the area from the  image in #2, and load the q2 palette. That would be your finished lighting effect.

 

Now the other, simpler way.

light2b.gif (1518 bytes)Ok, I wanted to add a small effect of light around this red area.

light3b.gif (1702 bytes)So I copied that image and just ran a SOFTEN filter on the whole thing.

light4b.gif (4267 bytes)Now, copy the area around where it softened...

light5b.gif (1537 bytes)...and paste it back over your original edge. Though the size of this image is small, the red ring around the red "light" is very noticeable in game.