Tutorial Details
- Program: Photoshop
- Difficulty: Intermediate
- CompletionTime: 1 hour
Download Source Files
In this tutorial, we’re going to create some really sharp-looking glow effects using a combination of layer styles, the Pen Tool and Color Blending. The end effect is quite stunning and hopefully you’ll pick up some tips you didn’t know before.
Step 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 color to black. Here are the exact color codes:
Foreground color – #922f00
Background color – #000000
Step 2:
In this tutorial, we actually need a pretty intense center, 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, colorizing ones and inverting ones. Color Dodge is probably the strongest of the lightening ones. As you can see in the screenshot, it produces a pretty full-on center.
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 the same 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, 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 are 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 Tool’s 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 color selected as your brush color 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. A little dialog box will 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 center 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 the 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 center 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 coloring 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 color blend and subtle smoky background combined make for a pretty great effect.
Just remember to experiment with settings and try applying the glow to different things to see how it turns out. And try different color combinations, some surprising combinations turn out really beautiful. Good luck!
Sample PSD
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Love it!
Thanks so much for sharing, mate.
==”how to do that?
I had gone through your tutorials. It was fantastic I have no words to describe it.Thanks very much for this tutorials page.I think people who cannot afford to to join classes can do so in this tutorial.
The effect is very nice however I have some issues, It would be helpful if you included more specific information with some steps. For example, there is no mention of the new document size and text size which can have a huge impact upon the outcome.
I found that i spent most of my time trying to guess the appropriate document size settings so that the effects would work correctly for me.
Also there is no mention of what to do if “stroke path” isnt available on the right click menu.
I can follow all the steps you provided but I found that the information that wasn’t provided made this too hit and miss for me.
I couldn’t get the effect to turn out as it looks in your tutorial and I followed every step exactly.
I’m dissappointed because this would otherwise be an excellent tutorial and effect but there’s just too many assumptions made by the tutor.
Hi S,
Try Control Click to bring up ‘Stroke Path’. That should help.
you are a joke! if you dont know what youre doing in photoshop then give up! those are fundamentals!
Very cool! Real pro tutorials!
Thanks!
Wonderful tutorial. Good to see the site back up and running! Cheers!
I’ve never seen before like as great as this tutorial, only seen it in psdtuts.com, they makes great tutorial like this. I’ve always visit this site since they started.
Thanks a lot for sharing your knowledge! Two thumbs up!
Wow. I’ve been looking for this.
Thank you very much.
Excellent tutorial!
Simple and straight forward :)
Looks Sweet!
Wow, the result is very nice and it’s very well explained ! Thanks, mate !
Yay, glad you guys liked it! Glows are so cool :-)
why i cant select Stroke Path in step 7
Make sure your brush is set to create a path and not a shape.
Great Site!!! Although I was wondering how do u get that faded effect at the end of each “glowing streak”? I cant seem to get it to taper even with with the simulate pressure icon clicked. But amazing tuts.
While checking paint brush tool go to its option (extreme top right of image ) and enable shape dynamics. Play with size jitter and minimum diameter.
You may have to try 2 to 3 times for perfect stroke also depend on curve.
That’s a really nice effect, overused in the web design industry, but really nice still.
So awesome. Thank you!
Amazing! What an original. Thanks!
Love this!
You guys are killing with these tutorials. Congrats.
Great Site!!! Although I was wondering how do u get that faded effect at the end of each “glowing streak�
Click the option to apply pressure.
Super nice. Ahh the beauty of “simulate pressure”
FYI, you mistakenly replaced the psd file in the chrome tutorial with the psd for this glow one…
Very impressive! Great work, thanks for sharing.
Wow!!!
The overall effect, very nice. Very simple and effective. Though I wouldn’t say it is “Hard” to figure out how to do this effect, it is a very well presented tutorial and should help many people who are in the earlier stages of the learning process. The only part I strongly dislike is that background :P I can’t stand the tacky chrome filter. Nice work though :)
I can’t get the “Simulate Pressure” bit to work either. :(
Great tutorial though.
You need to turn on brush dynamics and set pen pressure to be set to “pen tilt”
Thank you, that was helpful, I wasted 1 hour of my life before I found your answer :S
Very nice, thanks a lot for all the tutorials. Just found the site and it’s already inspired me with quite a few different ways to implement some of these techniques!
Great job and thanks again!
Very cool tutorial! I’m definitely going to bookmark this website and come back for more.
Excellent tutorial !! Thanks for sharing!
This tutorial is absolutely amazing! It was so easy and clear and my final results were just like the example! Thank you so much!
Sweeett !! Learned a couple of new tricks in this tutorial alone!
that is amazing!! I need to try that out stat!!
Nice work!
cool tutorial thanks…
Excellent tutorial… thanks.
for those who can’t get the tapered strokes…. you need to go to your brushes “window>brushes” and turn on “shape dynamics”
In order to get the tapered ends with the Simulate Pressure you have to make sure that shape dynamics is turned on and then you set control to “Pen Pressure”.
At least that helped with me in CS3
Yeah thanks GNELFELF, that helped me too, i set the minimum brush width to 1% to, so it would work properly :)
Excellent tut, and nice results :)
best effect your are good.
Excellent tutorial, I have been looking to do something like this for years and have never come across anything as good as this, thanks loads.
hmm…….. i cant get stroke path to work at all…… having trouble with pen tool…….hmm
Thanks for the excellent tutorials i was looking for something like this!
I like the web design integration add ins
simple and useful – very nice looking glow dudes
why are everyone of your tutorials so amazing? everyone is so great and useful
That is a very nice tut, i love it soo much!!!!!
Nice! I can definatly use this tutorial..
Thnx!
I can’t get the “stroke path” clickable…..help?
what if the “stroke path” isn’t clickable…I can’t figure out how to fix that
wow realy fantactic tutorial
thank you dear
To get the stroke path to be clickable you have to select Paths as the type of path you’re creating. To do this simply click the middle icon in the first set of pen options from the pen toolbar. The pen toolbar can be found at the top of your screen, just below the menubar. Make sure to have selected the Pen tool first or you will not see the correct toolbar. Hope this helps!
Thank you!!! I was having a terrible time figuring out why I couldn’t get Stroke Path to be an active choice.
Beautiful!!!
Really nice
Best tutorial yet! Good job. Keep up the good work.
Nice to start with the design… UP UP