Q
 "How do I make a lens flare in Fireworks?" --J.H.

This bit of razzle dazzle makes use of a blending mode trick to add a vector image of a lens flare to a photo. The advantage to creating your own lens flares in Fireworks is that they can be used on vector images as well as bitmaps. Note: the first two images are shown enlarged.

We'll start off by selecting the rectangle tool and dragging a black rectangle across our canvas. Next, add a circle and give it a white/black radial fill.

Drag out a second rectangle and add the same white/black radial fill that you used for the circle. Click on the Paint Bucket tool to bring up the gradient rotation bar. Pass your cursor over the bar. The cursor will turn into the rotation cursor, which looks like a circle with an arrow at the end of it. Click and drag on the bar to rotate it until the square handle of the bar is at the 12:00 position.

Drag the square upward, almost to the top of the rectangle, to distribute the gradient along the length of the rectangle. Be careful to leave the ends black because we want them to appear to fade into the background.

Next, we want to reduce the width of the rectangle to 1 pixel. To do this, open the Info panel and double click in the width (w) box. Type in the number 1 and press Enter. The rectangle becomes a narrow, gradient line.

While the rectangle is still selected, clone it (Edit > Clone ) and rotate the clone 90° to the right or left.

That should give you an attractive, four point star with a glow, as you see above.

Group the two gradient lines (Shift + select both lines, then choose Modify > Group), and then clone the group. Choose Modify > Transform > Numeric Transform.

In the Numeric Transform dialog box, choose Rotate from the drop down menu. Enter 40 for degrees.

Clone the group again and rotate it about 20 degrees.

Apply a Gaussian blur (Effect panel: Blur > Gaussian Blur) of 0.8 to the second, rotated clone.

Add a circle to the image. No Fill. The Stroke is white > Basic > Soft Rounded.

Reduce the opacity by moving the Opacity slider in the Layers panel to 50%. Move the circle to the back (Modify > Arrange > Send to Back).

Drag out a tiny circle with a white fill. In the Fill panel, set the edge of the circle to feather by 4. Add a glow to the circle (Effect panel: Shadow and Glow > Glow). I've used the default red color, a width of 11, and an opacity of 30%.

Move the circle with the glow to the middle of the star shape. Choose Edit > Select All; Modify > Group; and then Modify > Convert to Bitmap. Click on the new bitmap to select it. Click on Xtras and choose Brightness/Contrast from the Adjust Color menu. Move the contrast slider to about 20.

To use your lens flare, copy it, then paste it onto a dark area of an existing image. The flare image will be surrounded by a black rectangle.

To remove the dark rectangle and make the flare appear to glow, click on the flare image to select it, open the Layers panel and apply the Lighten blending mode.

This same technique can be used to create star, sun, plasma, and other interesting lighting effects on your images.

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