Super Sparkles

Not too long ago I worked on a really fun project related to the future of digital photography. I was tasked with creating digital cameras out of unlikely objects like belly rings, a tongue piercing, braces, and even teeth (and boy did iStockphoto.com prove to be great place to find images of those items!). On that last one, I needed to give it a little extra oomph and make it sparkle. Here's the image sans the sparkle:

Pretty neat but not neat enough. Today I'm going to show you a brush already living inside Photoshop proved to be perfect for the sparkle job, plus I'll show you how to spin and fade each sparkle individually. Let's get started!

Load the magic sparkle brush

Step 1: Pop open the Soon To Be Sparkling image in Photoshop and create a new layer by pressing Shift + Command + N (PC: Shift + Ctrl + N). Name it "sparkle" and click OK.

Step 2: Press B to select the Brush tool and hop up to the Options toolbar at the top of your screen. Activate the Brush pop-up menu by clicking the downward pointing triangle circled below in red. Next, click the fly-out menu at the top right of the resulting palette and choose Assorted Brushes (just look at the size of that list of brushes!). Press Append to add the new brushes to the bottom of your current list.

Step 3: Scroll down your new brush list until you see one called Crosshatch (circled below in red). Press it once to select it.

Step 4: Press D to set the color chips in the main Toolbar to the default of black and white, and press X until white pops on top. Mouse over to your document and click once to add a sparkle. TIP: Don't worry so much about where you place the sparkle; you can always press V to select the Move tool and put it in just the right spot.

Note: Resist the urge to add more than one sparkle per layer. You can, of course, but you'll lose some flexibility as you'll see in a moment.

Step 5: At this point we can either duplicate the existing sparkle layer or add another new layer for another sparkle. To duplicate, just drag the sparkle layer to the new layer icon at the bottom of the Layers Palette, like so:

Step 6: Press V to select the Move tool and position the new sparkle at the bottom right of the tooth cam.

Change its size

Step 7: Add another new layer by pressing Shift + Command + N (PC: Shift + Ctrl + N) and name it small sparkle.

Step 8: Reduce the size of the sparkle by changing the brush size. Cycle down in brush size by pressing the left bracket, [, and cycle up by pressing the right bracket, ]. Here I pressed the left bracket key one time, then clicked once slightly to the right of my first sparkle.

Step 9: Duplicate the small sparkle layer and press V to select the Move tool then drag it to another location.

Spin 'em around and...

Step 10: Because we've placed each sparkle on its own layer, we can rotate them to appear more natural and not completely identical to each other. With the newest small sparkle layer selected, press Command + T (PC: Ctrl + T) to bring up Free Transform. Rotate the sparkle as much or as little as you want by clicking and dragging as shown below, then press Return to accept the rotation.

Step 11: Press V to select the Move tool and move the rotated sparkle into place.

Fade 'em out

Step 12: If any of your sparkles seem too bright, just select that layer and lower its opacity a bit.

That's all there is to it! Here's what we end up with:

Click to enlarge

The beauty of creating each sparkle on its own layer is that you can move them around anywhere you want, spin them and control their intensity with the opacity slider.

See you next week!