Adding a Beam of Light on your Photos

I will show you today how to add a beam of light to your photos.

Open a photo in photoshop from your stock photo. if you don't have one you can use mine:

Click to enlarge

Open the photo you want to add a light beam effect.

Press Control-J to duplicate the layer.

With your Polygonal Lasso Tool draw a beam of light similar with mine:

Click to enlarge

Go to the Channels palette and click on the Save Selection as Channel icon

Now, click on Alpha 1 and press Control-D to Deselect.

Go to Filter menu > Blur > Gaussian Blur. When the dialog appears, enter 15 pixels

Now, you'll need to load the Alpha channel as a selection, so click on the Load Channel as Selection button at the bottom of the palette.

Once it's loaded, return to the RGB Composite channel by pressing Control + ~

Inverse your selection by pressing Control-Shift-I. Then press Control-L to open Levels, and drag the bottom-right Output Levels slider to the left to darken the surrounding areas

You'll have to Inverse the selection again, so press Control-Shift-I again.

Now that you've inversed the selection, bring up Levels again, but this time drag the bottom-left Output Levels slider to the right to lighten up the beam. Again, lighten it up more than you think you need to, and then click OK.

Press Control-D to Deselect your beam.

Add a layer mask to your beam layer. Click on the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers palette.

Press D and then X to set your Foreground color to black,

Press B to get the Brush tool, and then choose a small soft-edged brush from the Brush Picker

Now you can start painting over this girl , but only paint over the areas that fall inside the beam of light.

Another Step you can do it is to lower the opacity of this layer.Try to change the opacity to 50 % or less.

Click to enlarge

This technique is very useful if you have the right photo.

I hope you like this tutorial. Thank you.