Photoshop Rainbow, Light, and Glow Effect Tutorials
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Lighting and glow 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, gives 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.
Further Reading on SmashingMag:
- 50 Stunning Photoshop Text Effects Tutorials
- 50 Excellent Digital Photography Photoshop Tutorials
- 70 Beauty-Retouching Photoshop Tutorials
- Retro Rainbow Photoshop Tutorials
- 35 Beautiful Vintage and Retro Photoshop Tutorials
Photoshop Light Effects Tutorials
This tutorial covers numerous ways to transform your vector illustrations into masterpieces by using Photoshop lighting techniques, glows, and filters.
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.
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.
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.
This tutorial teaches how to create glow effects using layer styles, the pen tool, and some color blending 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.
8 Steps to Adding Fantasy Lighting with Photoshop
Some magical light coming from behind the model.
Space Lighting Effects in 10 Steps
How to create a space scene with some nice Lighting Effects in 10 Steps.
Use some stock photos and mix them together to create a nice light effect.
Create some thin flowing lines that look as if they emit light.
How to use a bulb image, with some textures and layer styles, to create a fabulous, bright illuminated text effect in Photoshop.
Lighting Effect Photoshop Tutorial
In this Photoshop tutorial, you will learn how to light up even a black/white image using lighting techniques and how to use adjustment layer to achieve realistic and believable light effect in Photoshop.
In this Photoshop tutorial you will create a crazy disco effect using some textures, blending modes and a touch of creativity.
A cool looking sparklers light text effect Photoshop tutorial. You will learn how to create a sparkler typography using any font type that you want.
Classic Light Effect in Photoshop
How to create a super cool text light effect mixing some photos to give more realism.
Create Light Painted Typography
How you create a similar look of a traditional light painting photography technique in Photoshop.
Apply fire and smoke and learn how to blend it perfectly to master this fiery lighting effect.
Design a Coldplay/Apple Inspired Portrait
This tutorial will show you how to create a portrait based on the style of the latest Coldplay Ad.
how to create a nice floating woman in a forest. Turn the forest from day to night and paint realistic hair and light effects.
Add fantasy light effects to photo-based artworks
By creating your own brush in Adobe Illustrator, and using scanned elements with Photoshop, it’s a simple process to create otherworldly scene.
Create A Retro Cosmic Design in Photoshop
This tutorial will teach you how to recreate a Retro Cosmic designs.
In this tutorial you will learn how to create a Rainbows wallpaper.
Create striking photo and vector mash-ups
In this tutorial, leading illustrator Neil Duerden shows how he got stuck into creating one of his stylish images.
In this tutorial you will learn how to create a realistic photometric lighting effect.
Egg Planet is a fantastic globe photo manipulation.
Making of the Imaginary Paint Dancers in Adobe Photoshop.
How to use stock images to make a beautiful digital artwork with nicely colored lights.
Create cosmic glows and lighting effects with particles in After Effects and Photoshop.
Create this Floating Superhero Scene with Sci-Fi Lighting Effects in Photoshop.
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.
