by Sean Hodge

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

• Lines Tutorial
  A super simple tutorial that makes rainbow colored lines. It shows you how to give them an appearance of brightness and depth.

  

• Expressive lighting effects
  This tutorial combines both vector and raster based techniques to achieve a glowing floral design. The glows are applied in Photoshop.

  

• Vector Polishing Techniques
  This tutorial covers numerous ways to transform your vector illustrations into masterpieces by using Photoshop lighting techniques, glows, and filters.

  

• 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.

  

• 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.

  

• 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.

  

• Creating A Fantastic Fantasy Night Sky In Photoshop
  Create cartoon style clouds with rainbows, stars, and glowing effects. Based on a Nik Ainley design.

  

• Neon lights with Photoshop
  Tutorial on how to make glowing lights effects out of vector shapes and brushes.

  

• 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.

  

• Add Another Dimension
  Use glows and blending modes to “add another dimension” to your Photoshop artwork

  

• Magic lighting effect in Photoshop
  Learn to magically make text wave and glow out of a magician’s hat.

  

• 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.

  

• How to Create Intense Light Streaks in Photoshop
  This tutorial shows you how to create light streaks that appear to flow around an object.

  

• 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.

  

• Advanced Glow Effects
  This tutorial teaches how to create glow effects using layer styles, the pen tool, and some color blending effects.

  

• 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.

  

• 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.

  

• 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.

  

• 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.

  

• 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.

  

• 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.

  

• 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.

  

• 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.

  

• High-Tech Swirling Aurora
  This tutorial covers how to apply the Wind Filter to a waving light beam to create an aurora effect.

  

• 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.

  

• 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.

• Published in Tutorials, April 3rd, 2008
• Tags: effects, Graphics, light, photoshop, Tutorials

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