Home Photoshop Photo Editing Excellent Lighting Effect Tutorial in Photoshop

Excellent Lighting Effect Tutorial in Photoshop

Added: Jun 17, 2011 Level: Beginner Software: Photoshop

Author: tutorialchip.com More by this author

Photoshop is one of the best tools for designers to create most amazing and beautiful effects. We can see many photo manipulations and stunning artworks on internet and most of them are created with Photoshop. Today in this tutorial, I'm going to show you a nice and easy way to use the Lighting Effect in Photoshop. Learn the techniques on how to create this cool lighting effect.

Photoshop Lighting Effect Tutorial Final Preview

Lighting Effect Tutorial

Tools and Resources

Tools and Resources

External Resources

We will use following external resources to complete this lighting effect tutorial.

Girl in Blue Jeans

Vector Curves Brushes

You can download these resources for complete this lighting effect tutorial.

Tools

We will use following major tools to complete this tutorial.

Pen Tool

Brush Tool

Smudge Tool

Photoshop Filters

Elliptical Marquee Tool

Let's start to create our amazing lighting effect tutorial.

Step 1

Open Adobe Photoshop, and create a new Photoshop document. I am going to create a new document of 750 x 550 px with white background.

Lighting Effect Tutorial

Step 2

Create a new layer and name it "Background". Set your foreground color to #505050 and background color to #000000. Drag a Radial Gradient at the position shown in the diagram.

Radial Gradient

Step 3

Create a new layer and name it "Curves Brush". Apply brushes as shown in the preview.

Curves Brush

Step 4

Now import the girl picture you downloaded from "girl in blue jeans" and extract the background using the Pen Tool (P) or any other method. Then remove the back strut with Eraser Tool as shown here.

Remove Image Background

Step 5

Create a new layer between the curves brush and the girl. Make a circular selection with Elliptical Marquee tool at the center.

Go to Select - Modify - Feather with 30px. Fill this selection with #D200FF. Change the Blending Mode to Screen and opacity to 50%.

Circular Selection

Step 6

Using the same method in step 5, create 2 more colored lights above the girl layer. The colors used are #ff8b00 and #96f8f7. Change the Blending Mode for these two layers to Overlay and opacity to 50%.

Colored Lights

Step 7

Create a new layer below the girl and draw a large rectangle with color #ffffff.

White Rectangle

Step 8

Now Go to Filter - Liquify. Using the Forward Warp tool with size 300px, push the white rectangle any way you like to form a wavy look.

Wavy Rectangle

Step 9

Select the Smudge tool with size 200px, smudge the white wave earlier around the girl. You can pull and push the wavy rectangle around in any manner as shown here.

Applying Smudge Tool Around The Girl

Step 10

For creating the glow effect from girl's legs, we take a new layer and name it "Texture Brush". Select Texture Brush and set Master Diameter 45 px, start applying brush from girl's legs with #dd9639 color.

Making more beautiful of glow effect we applying Blending Option - Outer Glow on Texture Brush layer.

Outer Glow

Now below you can see final preview of step 10.

Glow Effect Preview

Step 11

Ok, in this step we take a new layer on top and name it "Stroking Path 1?. Use the Pen tool make three paths, after making paths applying the stroke with #2ea0c6 color. Now apply the following blending options to this layer.

Outer Glow

Blend Mode: Normal

Opacity: 100%

Color: #00d2ff

Spread: 8%

Size: 16px

Color Overlay

Color: #04acd0

Blend Mode: Normal

Opacity: 100%

Now below you can see final preview of step 11.

Stroking Path

Step 12

In this step we take other new layer and name it "Stroking Path 2?. Use the Pen tool make two paths, after making paths applying the stroke with #ffffff color. Now apply the following blending options to this layer.