Ambient Glowing Streaks

Glowing streaks in Photoshop

by DaNDaMaN on Feb.27, 2010, under Photoshop, Tutorials

Finished image example.

Difficulty : Easy

This tutorial will show you how to achieve a glowing streak effect in Photoshop. It’s a very easy effect but can make an image a much better effect. Enjoy.

(Click images for a bigger preview)

Step #1 – The first thing you want to do is open up the

image you want to apply this effect to. You can use pretty much any image you like, a person, an animal, a guitar, anything works, in this example i’ll be using a picture of a friend of mine.

Step #2 – Next you want a create a new layer by clicking the small icon second in from the right, or alternatively going to Layer > New layer. Now select the pen tool by pressing the P key on your keyboard. Make sure your pen settings at the top of the screen are the same as the ones in the image below or this won’t work.

Step #3 - If you’ve never used the pen tool before you might find this a bit annoying at first, the best way to get past this is just keep mucking about with it until you get the hang of it and get the outcome you would like. Anyway, with your pen tool selected, and on the new layer you created, click where you want the streak to start, in this example i’ve started mine just to the right of his right leg. Now, click somewhere else, but hold it down and start dragging your mouse around, you’ll notice the streak now curves. Keep experimenting until you get it curving how you want it to.

Step #4 – This step is just pretty much repeating the last step until you have the outcome you want. Just incase your thinking.. “But I want my streaks to go behind and infront of the image” We’ll get to that so don’t worry.

Step #5 – Now select your brush tool, click the little arrow next to it and change your brush to a soft brush around 9px, you can experiment with the pixel size to get the exact look you want. And to make your life quicker set your foreground colour to white. You can quickly do this by pressing D then X on your keyboard.

Step #6 – Now go back to your pen tool (P) and right click anywhere on the page, you’ll get a panel pop up, you want to choose stroke path, this will stroke the path and you will begin to see your streak form. After you have chosen stroke path you want to choose brush from the drop down menu, and make sure simulate pressure is checked, this thinnens both ends of the streak to give it a nicer look.

Your outcome should be something like this (Hopefully)

Once the path is stroked, right click the page again and click delete path.

Step #9 – Now with the streak layer selected, press FX down the bottom of the screen, or alternatively right click the layer and go to blending options, and choose outer glow. This is something you can play around with to get the look you like best, but for this tutorial I used these settings below.

Step #10 – When you’ve achieved the look you like best, hit ok, and it’ll bring you back to the page with your streak with an outer glow on it. Now comes the final part, to give the streak the effect that it’s twirling round the image. To do this is very simple, just take the rubber tool, and rub out the parts that you want to be behind the image. Keep erasing all the parts that you don’t want to be seen, or want to appear like they are behind the image, and tadaa! Your pretty much finished. Of course you don’t have to stop at one streak, this effect is limited only to your imagination. So keep playing around, see what you come up with, hope you found this tutorial useful, feel free to ask any questions in the comments.