My Photoshop Tutorial

This type of magic light is easy to make, once you know the steps involved in the process. You will need to know how to work the magic inside the Brush Engine of Adobe Photoshop, cause that’s the place where everything happends. Also you will be required to know a little bit about Paths… not too much, just to draw a Path and Stroke it with a Brush. Once you know all this, you’re ready to go. The tutorial is quite easy to follow and I tried to add as many screen shots as required to understand it. Remember that you MUST try different values for the effects used (according to image size, resolution, etc.) and also try different approaches… maybe you will find a better way of doing it with better results. If that happends, I would like to know about it, so drop me a comment. What the hell…. drop me a comment anyway, I’ll be glad to read it.

First of all… this is the image I start with.

Select the Path Tool from the Photoshop toolbar. In case you don’t know which one is it, take a look here:

Draw a path, where you want the magic light to appear

Next we need to set up the Brush. For the sake of this tutorial, I used a Brush from the original Brush Set of Photoshop, but you can make your own Brush preset in under a minute. I’ll have a tutorial about that in 1 Minute Photoshop Tip by the time you read this, so make sure you check it out. Open the Brush Engine and set up your Brush. I will post here my set up, but it’s important to play around with those values and see what neat effects you may get.

Pick a color to match your image and set it as Foreground Color, select the Brush tool (in case isn’t already selected) and go to the Paths palette. There you will see your path. Right click on it and chose from the menu Stroke Path.

In the next box that appear on your screen, make sure you check the box that says: Simulate Pressure.

Create a new layer under the current one, go back to the Brush Engine and uncheck Scattering and in Shape Dynamics, drop the Size Jitter to 0.

Repeat the Stroke Path steps, again with Simulate Pressure box checked. Go to Layers Palette and put both layers in Color Dodge mode, like this:

The end result should be more or less like this: