Tips on Painting Volumetric Lighting

Final

Original

The path blur tool can get very good quick results for the directional god rays, you are going to want to make sure centered blur is unchecked. You can play with the other settings like taper and the speed settings to achieve your desired effect.

I like to set this to either screen or lighten and use a curves on this layer to get a balance of the light shafts.

I then paint a gradient of light of where I want my next set of light effects. This colour and density can be changed later.

I generate a noise and select a small slice of it.

This allows me to transform my small noise slice and get the shaft angle how I want it while having a small amount of variation in the shafts.

I alt click on any of the channels to get a mask of the noise pattern I created and put it in as a clipping mask for the painted light layer. I then try different settings like, lighten/screen/add and pull the opacity down a little bit.

This is another technique I like to do called exponential diffusion. You essentially, merge down your entire image then blur and fade back over and over again to build a really diffused image.

Then you can mask this diffused image for the subject and I use a curves to determine the falloff. Setting this to Lighten/screen can get some nice results as a lightwrap layer. Once you have all these elements in you can balance and adjust for final.

Add your final grades and color.