Advanced Glow

Advanced Glow Effects


In Effects by CollisIn
this tutorial we're going to create some really sharp looking glow
effects using a combination of layer styles, the pen tool and colour
blending. The end effect is quite stunning and hopefully you'll pick up
some tips you didn't know beforeStep 1:

As with pretty much
every tutorial I've ever written we begin with a radial gradient. This
one is pretty harsh and goes from a reddish brown colour to black. Here
are the exact colour codes: Foreground colour - #922f00
Background colour - #000000
Step 2:

In
this tutorial we actually need a pretty intense centre, so what we'll
do is duplicate the layer we just made and set the one above to a
blending mode of "Color Dodge" . There are a few types of
blending modes, darkening ones, lightening ones, colourizing ones and
inverting ones. Color Dodge is probably the stronges of the lightening
ones. As you can see in the screenshot it produces a pretty full on
centre.
Step 3:

Now
in our glow effect it helps to have a nice textured background. So we
are going to create a sort of smoky haze. To do this create a new
layer, then make sure you have white - #ffffff and black - #000000
selected as your background and foreground colors.Then go to Filter > Render > Clouds. This will give you some random cloud pattern as above.
Step 4:

Now
set the opacity of your layer to "Overlay" and 30% transparency. In
some instances this would be enough, but for our needs we want it even
smokier looking!So go to Filter > Sketch > Chrome and use
default settings of 4 and 7 for detail and smoothness respectively.
Actually you can probably mess around with those if you want, but the
defaults seem to be fine. When you're done you the result
should look a lot smokier (once its overlayed at 30% transparency that
is). You can see the result in the background of the next screenshot.
Step 5:

Now
before we can start making glows, we need to have something TO glow.
Here's where we break out the pen tool. If you have used the pen tool
much I suggest playing around with it a little. There are some tricky
things you can do with shortcuts but for this tutorial you don't need
those.In fact all we want to achieve is some nice curves.
Fortunately this isn't too hard. I find the trick is not to use too
many points. Instead rely on the pen tools natural curving and drag the
mouse out for each point so you get a big angle. In this S curve shown
above I've only used three points, the starting point, the end point
and one in between to give it the bend.
Step 6:

Once
you have a nice curve, create a new layer. Then click on the paintbrush
tool (B) and choose a very thin, hard brush. As you know soft brushes
are the blurry ones and hard brushes are more solid. In this case I
suggest using a thickness of 3.Note that you can have any colour selected as your brush colour because we'll go over it with a layer style shortly.
Step 7:

Now switch back to the PEN tool. You must switch tools in order to do this next bit.Then
right click and select "Stroke Path". You will get a little dialog box
appear as in the screenshot. Choose "Brush" and make sure there is a
tick next to "Simulate Pressure". This is important as it will give
your curve tapered ends which will make it rock! Next right click again and select "Delete Path".
Step 8:

You should now have something like the above. Just a thin, cool swishy thing.
Step 9:

Now
we add some glows. The easiest way to make our glows is to use layer
styles. And the best way to tell you what layer styles to use is to
tell you to download the sample Photoshop PSD from the bottom of this
page and then open it up and look through them there. In a nutshell I've added two sets of glows. To do this I first use Outer Glow
and then because I want a second glow, I change the Drop Shadow
settings so that it becomes a glow (you can do this by reducing the distance and changing the blend mode to something like Color Dodge) Oh and also I've used a Color Overlay to make the item white so that its like the centre of an intense glow.
Step 10:

So
now you have the same line but with a cool glow coming off it. The
beauty of using a layer style is that you can copy and paste it to
other layers. To do this you just right-click the layer and select
"Copy Layer Style" then create a new layer and right-click and choose
"Paste Layer Style".
Step 11:
So now repeat the same process a couple of times to make more squiggly lines. In
this instance I made one a little thicker by changing the paint brush
size before I did the "Stroke Path" bit of hte process. I also made a
third line and erased part of it and sorta made it join the other two
to look like a cool triangular shape.
Step 12:

Here I've added some text in and applied the same layer style to the text layers. It's
important to pay lots of care and attention to your text. When you're
first starting out use simple fonts and play with spacing between
letters, words and sizes. You can achieve a lot with just some small
tricks. Here I've contrasted the three words by making Glow a lot
larger and in regular casing, then made Advanced and FX much smaller,
with greater space between the letters and all Caps.You can control spacing with text using the Character window. If it isn't already open go to Window > Character and it should appear. Mess about with the different settings until you learn what each controls.
Step 13:

Now
we add some particles. To do this create a new layer then select a tiny
paint brush - size 3 - and just paint some dots on. It helps if they
are clustered towards the centre of the glow so that it looks like they
are emanating from there.You can make some of the central ones larger by doubling over on them with a second paint brush dab.Then paste our Glow layer style on to that layer too!
Step 14:

Now
that's looking pretty cool, but it will look even cooler if we give it
some subtle colouring instead of this super gaudy red.So create a new layer and using a radial gradient draw a blue to white gradient as shown.
Step 15:

Then set that layer to a blending mode of "Color" and change the opacity to 50%.You'll
see that it turns the image kind of bluish. I think that's looking much
cooler already, but just to go that extra step I also created a couple
of extra layers, one with some faint yellow and one with faint purple.
You can see them in the screenshot above.I set each layer to blending mode of "Color" and thin opacities so that they all fade together.
Step 16:

And
there you have it, advanced glow effects with a cool colour blend and
subtle smokey background combined make for a pretty great effect.Just
remember to experiment with settings and try appling the glow to
different things to see how it turns out. And try different color
combinations, some suprising combinations turn out really beautiful.
Good luck!
Sample PSD

Download the PSD for this tutorial