Use These 4 Landscape Lighting Techniques to Highlight Areas of Your Property Monday, April 10, 2023

Outdoor lighting is a worthwhile investment for your home or business due to the numerous benefits it offers. By illuminating your property at night, outdoor lighting showcases the beauty of your landscape, prolongs the amount of time you can spend outdoors enjoying the beautiful Georgia weather, makes it safer to navigate your property at night, and improves your property's overall security. To maximize the first benefit — showcasing your property — you can use 4 different landscaping lighting techniques. These techniques include silhouette lighting, grazing, wall-wash lighting, and moonlighting. In this blog, we explain each technique so that you have an idea of what's possible to achieve with your landscape lighting. Continue reading to learn more!

1. Silhouette Lighting

You're probably familiar with silhouettes. If it's not pitch-black dark outside and there is an object in your general vicinity, you can see the object's outline but not its intricate details. That is the object's silhouette. Silhouette lighting works similarly.

With this technique, a light is placed between landscape elements, such as trees and shrubs, and the exterior of your home or business. At night, the light shines upward so that it illuminates your building and creates a light background while simultaneously casting your landscape elements as dark outlines. The size and shape of your landscape elements will be visible, but you won't be able to see their details closely.

2. Grazing

If you graze an object, it means that you just barely touch it. Think of the grazing lighting technique in much the same way. With grazing, light shines on only a small portion of your building's exterior wall, just barely touching it. While the light is very concentrated in one spot, it creates shadows in the surrounding area that mildly illuminate the surface of the wall. If you like using shadows as a visual effect, then grazing is a great lighting technique for you.

3. Wall-Wash Lighting

Wall-wash lighting is another excellent lighting technique to use on your property. You can essentially think of it as a foil to grazing. While grazing shines light on only a small portion of your wall and uses shadows to draw attention, wall-wash lighting shines light on a significant portion of your building's exterior wall and utilizes light to draw attention. As its name indicates, wall-washing lighting washes out your selected walls with light so that they are clearly visible. If you want the area directly surrounding your home or business to be brighter at night, then you can't go wrong with wall-wash lighting.

4. Moonlighting

The last landscape lighting technique you can use to highlight your property is moonlighting. The goal of this technique is to create a soft, natural lighting effect that mimics light from the moon and eloquently illuminates your property at night. This is typically achieved by installing lights in trees or other high points above your property and positioning them to shine gently down on the surrounding landscape elements. Moonlighting is a form of downlighting that has a subtle brightening effect on the property where it is installed.

Schedule our outdoor lighting installation service today!

Are you ready to add outdoor lighting to your home or business? If so, then you can let us take care of that for you. At O'Neill Landscape Group, we install breathtaking landscape lighting displays at residential, commercial, and HOA properties in Woodstock, Roswell, Alpharetta, GA, and nearby areas. We can create custom lighting displays that highlight the focal points of your landscape by employing techniques such as silhouette lighting, grazing, wall-wash lighting, and moonlighting. Now is the time to make your property shine. Call us today at (770) 627-5012 to schedule our outdoor lighting installation service!