Cross-Processing
Vanishing Point
Alyssa Davis
in vanishing point
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Adobe Photoshop Tutorials - Rainbows, Glows and Light Effects
Lighting effects in Adobe Photoshop are used to add flare and polish to images. They communicate feelings of creativity, technology, magic, and fantasy. Creating beams, glows, motion trails, rainbows, or an assortment of other lighting effects, give your images ambiance and depth.
Now it’s time for a sparkling dose of related Photoshop learning material. This article provides a resource of Adobe Photoshop Light Effects tutorials. These tutorials offer an assortment of techniques for making your work creatively glow.
Please consider them as an extension of our ultimate Adobe Photoshop series:
- Adobe Photoshop Tutorials - Best Of features some of the best Adobe Photoshop tutorials out there,
- Adobe Photoshop Video Tutorials - Best Of showcases 80 excellent Adobe Photoshop video tutorials which you can use as a starting point to improve your skills or observe how professionals do their job.
Photoshop Light Effects Tutorials
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Lines Tutorial
A super simple tutorial that makes rainbow colored lines. It shows you how to give them an appearance of brightness and depth.
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Expressive lighting effects
This tutorial combines both vector and raster based techniques to achieve a glowing floral design. The glows are applied in Photoshop.
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Vector Polishing Techniques
This tutorial covers numerous ways to transform your vector illustrations into masterpieces by using Photoshop lighting techniques, glows, and filters.
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How to Make the “Flare” Effect As Seen On WPCustomization.com
In this tutorial, the Lens Flare filter is used on the background. Then the lighting is created with brushes and different blending modes.
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Sparkling Hot Girl in Photoshop
Utilize an assortment of techniques to achieve a sparkling design. Masks, blurs, brushes, layers styles and other effects are used in this tutorial.
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Amazing Photoshop light effect in 10 Steps
“If you know a bit of Layer Styles and the Brush engine in Photoshop you will be able to create amazing effects. It will depend exclusively on your imagination and playing with the tool. Sometimes just changing some settings and you get a totally different effect.” This tutorial applies lighting effects to a coffee cup icon.
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Creating A Fantastic Fantasy Night Sky In Photoshop
Create cartoon style clouds with rainbows, stars, and glowing effects. Based on a Nik Ainley design.
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Neon lights with Photoshop
Tutorial on how to make glowing lights effects out of vector shapes and brushes.
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Electrifying Energy Beams
In this tutorial you start with the pen tool by drawing a line. Then you transform that line into an energy beam with layer effects. This makes it glow white and purple around a microphone.
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Add Another Dimension
Use glows and blending modes to “add another dimension” to your Photoshop artwork
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Magic lighting effect in Photoshop
Learn to magically make text wave and glow out of a magician’s hat.
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Extreme sports branding
This tutorial first covers creating a logo then it gets into the main snowboard illustration. Vector shapes are applied with layer effects and brushes to make the illustration stand out. This is part one in a series.
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How to Create Intense Light Streaks in Photoshop
This tutorial shows you how to create light streaks that appear to flow around an object.
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Chroma Wallpapers
This tutorial explains how to create an energetic design with lines. Utilize blurs, warps, and other effects. Add glowing and vibrating colors to give this image a dynamic feeling.
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Advanced Glow Effects
This tutorial teaches how to create glow effects using layer styles, the pen tool, and some color blending effects.
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Lighting Effects - Beam Wave
Learn to transform a one pixel lines into a glowing beam. Then add radial balls of light to emulate a pulse explosion.
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Add A Sparkle Trail To A Photo
Learn how to add a sparkling trail of stars to your photos using brushes, layer styles, and effects.
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Creating light motion trails & glowing sparks
This tutorial covers creating light motion trails by using the pen tool with layer styles. It also covers creating sparkling stars in Illustrator and then importing them into the Photoshop design.
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Blue Glow Layout
This tutorial reviews the process for creating a simple layout in Photoshop, while revealing techniques for creating an abstract glowing centerpiece design.
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Fantasy Art Photoshop tutorial
Learn to create a fantasy image with glowing halos of lights and stars. Notice how you can apply glow directly to a cropped image. The tutorial creates the halos with the Elliptical Marquee tool. It applies a stroke and then a glow to the selection, on its own layer.
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Photoshop: Light Beam
This tutorial reviews the basic process of creating a light beam in Photoshop; however, it does refer to other tutorials for some effects. The techniques in this tutorial involve using different brushes to paint the light, and then they are smeared with the Smudge Tool. There are a few filters used as well.
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Even fairies have to rest - glow and lightning tutorial
First, the photograph is treated to make it a little darker so that the points of light in the design will stand out. Both a linear wrapping beam and points of radiating light are covered in this tutorial.
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Beautiful lighting FX effect in Photoshop
This tutorial will show you how to make a beautiful lighting effect with the scatter brush. This tutorial covers the basics.
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High-Tech Swirling Aurora
This tutorial covers how to apply the Wind Filter to a waving light beam to create an aurora effect.
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Slow shutter text effect - Photoshop
Layers of blurred elements are used in this tutorial. This blurring technique is worked into glowing linear text and circle shapes.
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Seriously Cool Photoshop Explosion Effect
Use layer masks and light effects to creatively break apart an image. Points of bright lights, swirly brushes, and warped lines help bring this design together.
Which techniques can be applied?
At the compositional level, these effects are often applied through shapes. So, you might start with the pen tool by drawing a curvy line. Or, grab a brush and draw some scattered stars. Or, open up Illustrator first to compose design elements that you then pull back into Photoshop. The tutorial Expressive lighting effects demonstrates how to use interesting design shapes first and then apply glowing effects to them.
Once you know how you’d like to use shapes, you can apply effects to them. Layer styles and Blending Modes are common effects used to create this look. With Layer Styles, you might apply Glow. Or, with Blending Modes, you might set the layer to Lighten, Overlay, or Color Dodge – get the element you’re working with to sparkle and shine.
In the tutorial Chroma Wallpapers, lines are bent with the Warp Transform tool before being given a glow treatment.
There are more techniques often used; such as different types of blurs and gradients. You could play with Photoshop’s built in lighting effects, like Lens Flare, as well. Or get creative. Mix in rainbows. Paint glowing bursts of light. Manipulate the lines and shapes your working with.
In the tutorial Chroma Wallpapers lines are bent with the Warp Transform tool before being given a glow treatment. This puts a new spin on the use of glowing light techniques.
Where can I get some inspiration?
Consider raising it to the next level, after you’ve mastered the basics of lighting and glow techniques. To raise the quality of your glowing work you’ll need inspiration and imagination.
Look at artists, such as Chuck Anderson, that have mastered these techniques. Try to figure out what they have done – beyond the basics.
Chuck Anderson’s work impresses with the beauty of its lightning effects.
Also, look at photographic effects; for example, look at how light appears to blur and travel in long exposure photography. See the Flickr Group Light Stream for samples of this kind of photography.
Keep your eyes and mind open. You’ll start to see these effects in the real world. Or look to fantasy art; the sparkling feel of these effects can be used to supersede reality, magically transforming your designs.
Sean Hodge is the creative mind behind AiBURN.com, a Weblog about design, creativity, inspiration and graphics.
The Neverending (Background Image) Story
Everyone likes candy for Christmas, and there’s none better than eye candy. Well, that, and just more of the stuff. Today we’re going to combine both of those good points and look at how to create a beautiful background image that goes on and on… forever!
Of course, each background image is different, so instead of agonising over each and every pixel, I’m going to concentrate on five key steps that you can apply to any of your own repeating background images. In this example, we’ll look at the Miami Beach background image used on the new FOWA site, which I’m afraid is about as un-festive as you can get.
1. Choose your image wisely
I find there are three main criteria when judging photos you’re considering for repetition manipulation (or ‘repetulation’, as I like to say)…
- simplicity (beware of complex patterns)
- angle and perspective (watch out for shadows and obvious vanishing points)
- consistent elements (for easy cloning)
You might want to check out this annotated version of the image, where I’ve highlighted elements of the photo that led me to choose it as the right one.
The original image purchased from iStockPhoto.
The Photoshopped version used on the FOWA site.
2. The power of horizontal lines
With the image chosen and your cursor poised for some Photoshop magic, the most useful thing you can do is drag out the edge pixels from one side of the image to create a kind of rough colour ‘template’ on which to work over. It doesn’t matter which side you choose, although you might find it beneficial to use the one with the simplest spread of colour and complex elements.
Click and hold on the marquee tool in the toolbar and select the ‘single column marquee tool’, which will span the full height of your document but will only be one pixel wide. Make the selection right at the edge of your document, press ctrl-c / cmd-c to copy the selection you made, create a new layer, and hit ctrl-v / cmd-v to paste the selection onto your new layer. using free transform (ctrl-t / cmd-t), drag out your selection so that it becomes as wide as your entire canvas.
A one-pixel-wide selection stretched out to the entire width of the canvas.
3. Cloning
It goes without saying that the trusty clone tool is one of the most important in the process of creating a seamlessly repeating background image, but I think it’s important to be fairly loose with it. Always clone on to a new layer so that you’ve got the freedom to move it around, but above all else, use the eraser tool to tweak your cloned areas: let that handle the precision stuff and you won’t have to worry about getting your clones right first time.
In the example below, you can see how I overcame the problem of the far-left tree shadow being chopped off by cloning the shadow from the tree on its right.
The edge of the shadow is cut off and needs to be ‘made’ from a pre-existing element.
The successful clone completes the missing shadow.
The two elements are obviously very similar but it doesn’t look like a clone because the majority of the shape is ‘genuine’ and only a small part is a duplicate. Also, after cloning I transformed the duplicate, erased parts of it, used gradients, and — ooh, did someone mention gradients?
4. Never underestimate a gradient
For this image, I used gradients in a similar way to a brush: covering large parts of the canvas with a colour that faded out to a desired point, before erasing certain parts for accuracy.
Several of the gradients and brushes that make up the ‘customised’ part of the image, visible when the main photograph layer is hidden.
The full composite.
Gradients are also a bit of an easy fix: you can use a gradient on one side of the image, flip it horizontally, and then use it again on the opposite side to make a more seamless join.
Speaking of which…
5. Sewing the seams
No matter what kind of magic Photoshop dust you sprinkle over your image, there will still always be the area where the two edges meet: that scary ‘loop’ point. Fret ye not, however, for there’s help at hand in the form of a nice little cheat. Even though the loop point might still be apparent, we can help hide it by doing something to throw viewers off the scent.
The seam is usually easy to spot because it’s a blank area with not much detail or colour variation, so in order to disguise it, go against the rule: put something across it!
This isn’t quite as challenging as it may sound, because if we intentionally make our own ‘object’ to span the join, we can accurately measure the exact halfway point where we need to split it across the two sides of the image. This is exactly what I did with the FOWA background image: I made some clouds!
A sky with no clouds in an unhappy one.
A simple soft white brush creates a cloud-like formation in the sky.
After taking the cloud’s opacity down to 20%, I used free transform to highlight the boundaries of the layer. I then moved it over to the right, so that the middle of the layer perfectly aligned with the right side of the canvas.
Finally, I duplicated the layer and did the same in reverse: dragging the layer over to the left and making sure that the middle of the duplicate layer perfectly aligned with the left side of the canvas.
And there you have it! Boom! Ta-da! Et Voila! To see the repeating background image in action, visit futureofwebapps.com on a large widescreen monitor or see a simulation of the effect.
Thanks for reading, folks. Have a great Christmas!
Alyssa Davis
in background, image, repeating, how-to
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