glowing magic in photoshop

A big trend recently is to have glowing elements in many bright colors in illustration and design. A magical rainbow if you will. It’s pretty easy to do and there are some Photoshop tricks to create your glowing magic quickly.

In Photoshop (I’ll be using version CS3 for this tutorial), create a new document in a manageable size, for example 350 wide by 450 high at 72dpi.
Pick a dark background color, and a slightly lighter foreground color. Select your Gradient Tool (G) in your tool bar, and select the Radial Gradient option at the top. Make sure your foreground and background colors are selected for the gradient. Now make a soft gradient circle by clicking and dragging your cursor on your image. I also like to keep my layers organized by always labeling them as I go.

Add an object from another illustration you did, or a free icon from a source like Artura Design Studio. Remember to always be aware of copyrights.

Next, we will add a glowing ball to start the lighting effect. Add a white circle with the ellipse shape tool. Hold down shift to make a perfect circle. Go to the Filter drop down at the top and hover to select Blur and click to select Guassian Blur… Click OK on the pop up warning to rasterize the shape and select a radius of about 10 pixels. Click OK and name your layer. Create a folder in your layer pallet and name it “magic” and set the folder layer property to Color Dodge and place your glowing ball layer into the “magic” folder.

Stay with me through this next step. We will need some magic sparkles by using a basic round brush and adjusting some of the brush pallet options. Add a new layer in the “magic” folder called sparkles. Add a layer style to the sparkles layer by clicking the FX icon on your layers pallet and selecting Outer Glow.
Let’s select the Brush Tool (B) with white as your foreground color, and open the Brushes Pallet. Follow the images to set up your brush options and brush on some sparkles.

It’s already looking good, but we’ll add more details. Create a new layer under the “magic” folder and call it dust. Set this layer Blending Mode to Color Dodge. Set your foreground color to white and your background color to black. Select the Lasso Tool (L) and set the Feather to 20 pixels. Select a fat pear shape on your image. Open the Filter tab and hover onto Render and click on Clouds. Chose the Clouds option again and again until you are happy with the selection.

We need rainbow colors! Create a new folder and call it “rainbow”. Set this layer blending property to Pass Through. Create a new layer in this folder and set the blending property to Hue with a 50% opacity. Select the Gradient Tool (G) and the Radial Gradient option, drop down the color selector for the Gradient Tool and chose the rainbow option. Click and drag the gradient in the image. I erased out the area that Mr. Bee was on the rainbow gradient layer to preserve his original colors.