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A Sober Test of Photoshop's Relighting Share This on LinkedIn   Tweet This   Forward This

1 October 2026

The dramatic relighting demonstrated by Kris Kashtanova in his video intrigued us enough to test the new Relight tool in Photoshop (beta).

But right away, the problem we faced was what image to relight. Among our most recent images was one of that white orchid we used for the Indigo AI Playground tests. We'd taken it late one afternoon and just didn't like how it was lit.

It was backlit. And we hadn't been able to get Indigo to render it as we saw it, which was with some light on the orchid itself so it seemed luminous. Instead, it came out nearly as a silhouette.

The question we posed was whether Relight could just add a little fill light. Nothing spectacular. Nothing wild. Just a fill.

We tried moving the sliders all over the place before settling on what we're showing you here.

Rob de Winter describes the process:

  1. First, update your Photoshop (beta) version.
  2. Open a photo and go to Layer>New Relight Layer.
  3. A light is created automatically and you can drag it around your photo. With the sliders in the Contextual Taskbar or the Properties panel, you can set the distance of the light (Close/Far) and how much of the original lighting you still want to see.
  4. I also find it really handy to play with the Intensity and Diffusion sliders to change the brightness of the light and how far it spreads.
  5. Click the Add Light button to add another light.
  6. When you're done, click Done in the Contextual Taskbar. You'll then get the high-resolution version in a new Relight layer.

He doesn't mention that it will cost you a few AI credits to Relight.

We're displaying the low-resolution version you work with on screen. As he mentions, only when you are done with the changes does Photoshop render the high-resolution version.

We thought it was an improvement. A pretty good impersonation of a fill light, in fact.


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