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Photoshop Tutorial

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Light and Glow Effect In Photoshop

Photoshop light effects and glow effects

Picture 1. In this tutorial we are going to create the picture above using several different Photoshop effects. Click here to see a larger version.

29.10.2008 Category: Photoshop
In this Photoshop effect tutorial I cover the creation of several different light and glow effects in Photoshop. In this tutorial we are going to recreate picture 1. The effects in picture 1 consist of smoke, light trails, sparkles, stars and bokeh effects. Luckily it's pretty simple to create each of these effects in Photoshop.

Smoke Effect in Photoshop

Overlay blending mode

Picture 2. Overlay blending mode.

Glowing cloud effect in Photoshop

Picture 3. Colorful smoke effect in Photoshop.

Let's start with the smoke effect in the background. The smoke effect is created by rendering clouds and coloring them with an overlay layer:

Overlay Text

Overlay text on top of  glow effect in Adobe Photoshop

Picture 4. Overlay text.

Next we'll create some text on top of the smoke. Use Type Tool to create some text. Change the Blending mode of the text layer to Overlay. Now your image should look similar to picture 4.

Light Trail Effect in Photoshop

Photoshop effects concerning light and glow

Picture 5. Brush stroke along path produces a light motion trail.

Next we'll create light motion trails with the help of a Pen Tool. The Pen Tool can be tricky if you don't have previous experience with it. You'll probably need the following tools found from the Pen Tool flyout button:

Photoshop Pen Tool Pen Tool - Use this tool to draw the curve in the first place. You can click and drag to create curves on the fly. Don't worry if the curve is not perfect, you can modify it later.

Add Anchor Point Tool in Photoshop Add Anchor Point Tool - Use this tool if you want to add an anchor point to an existing curve

Remove Anchor Point Tool in Adobe Photoshop Remove Anchor Point Tool - Use this tool if you want to remove an anchor point from an existing curve

Convert Point Tool in Adobe Photoshop Convert Point Tool - Use this tool to convert and move anchor points and to control their handles:

Sparkle Effect Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop light and glow effects

Picture 6. Glowing sparkles along the light trail.

Next we are going to add some sparkles along the trail. This is very easy to do. Just select the light trail layer and use Brush Tool to create small dots to it. Use Brush sizes of 1-4px. Now the image should look similar to picture 6.

Motion Blurred Glow Effect

Photoshop light effect

Picture 7. Subtle motion blur effect is added.

Let's add some motion blur to the light trail:

Star Effect in Photoshop

Creating star effect in Adobe Photoshop

Picture 8. The process of creating a star in Photoshop.

Photoshop glow effect

Picture 9. Star effects applied to the image.

The next of the Photoshop effects we're going to create is stars. First we are going to create a simple star and then apply some layer effects to it. The following process is illustrated in picture 8.

Bokeh Effects in Photoshop

Effects in Photoshop: Light and Glow

Picture 10. The final image with many different light and glow effects made in Photoshop. Click here to see a large version.

Photoshop glow and light effects applied to photo

Picture 11. Photoshop light and glow effects applied to a photo. Click here to see a larger version.

The last thing to do in this Photoshop effect tutorial is to add some simple bokeh effects to the image:

By using your imagination and combining each effect in Photoshop you can create multitude of different images filled with different kind of light and glow effects. Here are some nice Photoshop effect tutorials elsewhere: