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Paisely Brushes

Light Beam Graphic

In this tutorial I will be teaching you how to create magical looking beams to enhance your pictures!

You can use any picture you like but I’ll be using this picture.

First we want to select the pen tool to create the base for our beam. Before you begin make sure your settings are set to paths and pen tool.

Make a new raster layer. And then begin drawing a squiggly line around Lindsay’s body. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just make sure you curve the lines nicely. Your shape should look something like this:

Now that we have a nice looking shape, we need to give it a stroke. Select your brush tool and select a 7px circle default brush with 100% hardness. Make sure your foreground color is white. The brush we select will be used for the line on our beam, so select your size and hardness wisely!

Go back to your pen tool and right click the path on your picture. Select stroke path.

A window should come up. Select Brush and make sure stimulate pressure is checked off. Click okay and your beam should now have taken shape!

Right click your path once more and select delete path to get rid of your path. Now you can clearly see your shape.

Now select your lasso tool and cut away every other beam in front of her body to create the illusion that the beam is going around her body.

After you’re done your image should look like this:

We can begin to add effects to the beam to bring it to life. Right click on your beam layer and select blending options

Match your settings to mine for Outer Glow (color #f58cb2 used):

And then again for Inner Glow (color #f5c2ce used):

Duplicate your layer and then right click and select Clear Layer Style
to get rid of all the effects for that layer.

Now go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and set it to 4.9 pixels.
Your picture should now look like this:

To add ‘baby sparkles’ to give it a more magical look, we need to change our brush settings. Select the brush settings panel

and now proceed to match your settings to mine:



Now once you’ve finished, make a new raster layer and go over parts of your beam to give it a magical look. You can change your brush size and use different opacities to your liking.
You can now colorize the picture to your liking. You can search through my advanced picture tutorials to learn to colorize your picture in different ways. An easier way would be to just play with your adjustment layers (change the colors) and set them to different layer options.

My picture turned out like this:

Originally published on 12/22/2008 - Photoshop Tutorials | 17 comments »

Comments

  1. Thank you so much! This really helped. I learned alot :P

    Aimee-Louise posted this March 24 // # Reply

  2. this is sooo easy, yet it looks fantastic. i love it!

    violette posted this April 06 // # Reply

  3. sadly, i cannot figure out how to do this with pspx2 :( great tutorial by the way… i haven’t seen many other people, if any at all, put this effect up for a tutorial.
    xx

    Keshia posted this April 13 // # Reply

  4. Hey!!!! it is soo beautiful but i dont think i can use it for psp9, :[ but i love your site!!! XXX

    Tamika posted this May 03 // # Reply

  5. Is it for photoshop CS3? & how can i make a raster layer? :$

    Jamie posted this May 04 // # Reply

  6. Where you got the Beam layer ? You dint show how to do …

    ♥XiaoRene posted this May 17 // # Reply

  7. This is great but is there any way to do this or something similar in PSP?

    Niki posted this May 17 // # Reply

  8. Niki – There is a way. It’s not as nice, but I tried to figure it out. x)
    Open a new vector layer and use your pen tool and set it to any width (I like 3) using white (well, I like white) and draw swirly shape around your person. erase the parts that you don’t want to show up on top of the body. Then go to Effects > 3d effects > drop shadow and use whatever color you want to drop shadow on each side. I use (-3, 3) (-3, -3) (3, 3) and (3, -3). Then go to adjust > blur > gaussian blur. Set your opacity in your layers menu to whatever you think fits. (:

    Angel posted this June 14 // # Reply

  9. Hey! i have a problem!!
    When i use the lasso tool, i cut her face! xD
    i cant just cut the stuff in front her body!!…. how can i do it!??

    Erika posted this June 18 // # Reply

  10. Erika, are you sure your light beams are on a separate layer? Also, when using the lasso tool, make sure the light beam layer is selected.

    Graphics Lover posted this June 26 // # Reply

  11. do you have this tutorial for gimp?

    guliett posted this July 10 // # Reply

  12. I Get Lost At The Part with the stroke path and brush part

    Edgar Alcantara posted this July 21 // # Reply

  13. great tutorial! just starting to mess around on cs4 and these are helping me heaps. maybe you could do some tuts on effects to fonts and such? thanks :)

    liz posted this August 01 // # Reply

  14. Hey. this tutorial is amazing but i always have trouble on the first bit, how do u make ur lines so curve cos wen i did it its pointy XD pls help :D thanks

    Keira posted this August 22 // # Reply

  15. This is beautiful, just wish it could be done in PSP!

    Freda posted this August 26 // # Reply

  16. took me a while to get the pen tool right but im getting better thank you SO MUCH

    Italia posted this November 26 // # Reply

  17. What website? _

    Mimii posted this November 28 // # Reply

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