Trendy lightburst motion trail Photoshop tutorial
A co-worker of mine recently found a great article in Wired that had some really beautiful looking “lasers”, as he called them with some light bursts and motion trails around them. He wanted some insight as to how one could emlways wanted to write a cool trendy tutorial so I’ve decided to unwrap the trendy light trails with a handy Photoshop tutorial.
Download Source PSD
Download Custom Brushes used in this tutorial
Begin – Choose a source focal point
To start out you need some sort of focal point so I figured a picture of one of our t-shirt models, Kendra, would do just fine. After extracting her from the background using various techniques (pen tool, magnetic lasso, and masks) we’re left with a blank canvas and a girl. If you can, preserve your layer masks.
Drawing Lasers and Motion Trails (option 1)
There are plenty of ways to make the little lasers, and I’ll be the first one to tell you that there really isn’t any right or wrong way–so for demonstration purposes I will show you the two ways I made my lasers in the above image. The first way of which is by using the pen tool and making a wavy line like I have done below:
After you’ve drawn your path you need to select the brush tool by hitting the “b” key or by selecting it from the toolbar on the left. Right click on your canvas to bring up your brushes window and select a brush with a very soft edge that (depending on the size of your image) is about 7 pixels wide.
After you’ve done this, select the pen tool again by hitting the “p” key or by clicking on the pen tool button to the left. Create a new layer (Layer>New>Layer) and then right click on that path and goto the “stroke path” option.
A window will popup. Check the “simulate pressure” option and make sure your brush tool is selected. Then click ok.
You will notice that you have a brush stroke going across where your path is and it should go from thick to thin at certain points in your curve with simulated pressure.
Now to get the glow effect on the brush you need to apply a layer glow. (Layer>Style>Outer Glow) Here are approximately the settings that I used with the color #006cff:
You may notice your glow may not have the intensity that you want. The best way to remedy this is to duplicate your layer by selecting it in the layer box and hitting apple+j or cntrl j and then merge those two layers together by hitting apple+e or cntrl+e. Here’s what mine looks like currently
After making one of the lasers this way you may want to repeat the process with another path, or you may want to just move your other path down and transform it. Save the paths you create as we’ll be using them later in the tutorial by going to your paths layer, and dragging your “work path” to the new path icon which should give you something similar to this in your path window:
Creating Motion Trails and Lasers (option 2)
Now one way to make very smooth consistent “lasers” is to use the above method. The other way, which may be a bit more quick and dirty but looks just as good is to brush the lasers on by hand. To do this, create a new layer and select a brush similar to the one you just had, except size this one down a few pixels by either opening the brush window (F5) or by hitting the “[” key which will scale down the brush size one pixel at a time. Then, by hand, draw several “lasers” from right to left across the canvas as I have here:
Somewhere between creating the live demo of this tutorial and writing the actual tutorial I did manage to forget a few screen captures so forgive me if there is some slight inconsistencies in my lasers. (I re-drew mine for this demo, but the actual lasers in the image were slightly different–but they were created in the same fashion) Now that you have several white lines you need to apply the blue glow effect to them. To do this, copy your layer style from your previous outer glow layer style and paste it onto your new layer. (Right click on layer with style and goto copy layer style, then right click on the layer you want to apply the style to and click paste layer style)
You can also recreate the layer style from scratch by going to layer>style>outer glow. and enter in the same settings that we did above. After you’ve done that your image should look something like this:
A few things to note about my image:
- My previous lasers have their layer modes set to things like color burn, and overlay to give some variation in the colors as you can see here.
- I’ve moved Kendra into the foreground in front of the lasers because… well because she’s the focal point!
- After getting my second laser technique down I decided to duplicate that layer and motion blur the layer to give it a bit different of a look from the first layer of lasers.
Add Light Bursts and thick Motion Blurs
It’s at this point that it might be a good idea to reference our original source inspiration to get an idea of what else they were doing with their design. I notice with some of these images that they use a bit of a blur with some of their lasers, as well as lasers of a different thickness.
The first thing I do is repeat my first technique for creating lasers, only this time I use a thicker brush and I’m going to blur the thick laser as well as distort it to give it a smokey feel. I repeat my first technique above by creating a path and a thicker brush and stroking my path.
Don’t forget to re-apply the previous glow layer style to get the right color blue neon on the outside. The next thing we want to get on this specific laser is some distortion. To get the right kind of distortion on this laser I want to use the glass filter, and in order to do that I need to put my white laser on a black background. To do that I create a new layer (Layer>New Layer) and fill it with black and place it below my white laser layer. I then merge the two layers by hitting apple+E or cntrl+e. After you have the laser on black you need to apply the glass filter with these settings (or something close to it):
This should give you a fatty laser beam that looks something like this:
Now those of you who are beginners are thinking, “OH NOES!? Where are my beautiful laser beams and motion trails that I made before?!?” Don’t worry they’re still there. What we need to do now is one of two things. You can either set this layer mode to “screen” which will act just like a real screen and make all the black invisible…
…or you can use the magic eraser tool. (Shift+E or hold the mouse down on the eraser tool till you see the magic eraser.) I don’t quite recall why I used the magic eraser, but for some reason it seemed to be the quick and dirty way to get this done so we’ll stick with it.
After selecting the magic eraser tool and clicking on the black areas of the image, I duplicated my fatty laser beam and set the layer mode of my copy to overlay to give it a more intense glow effect with a slightly reduced the opacity. Here’s what my layers currently look like.
Bring out the focal point with large light bursts with brush modes
After looking back at the reference image, I think our design still needs more of a focal point for our lasers, so we need to add some distorted light bursts. There are plenty of ways to do this whether it be using the lens flare or light effects, but I prefer to use good old custom brushes with layer modes. To start out, pick a dull tone of the color you want your light burst to be. I’ve chosen a dull blue (#1b294e if you want the hex code) Create a new layer. Then you need to set your brush settings to something similar to what I have here:
In order to get that intense bright look it’s important that you set the brush’s mode to “Color Dodge.” Then you need to pick a place on your canvas and click in roughly the same place three times as I have done here. You’ll notice that the more you click the more intense your color dodge becomes. I’ve clicked three times and ended up with a shape that looks something like you see below:
To polish off our light burst I want to add some white in the middle of the burst so that it doesn’t look like such a tacky gradient. To do this I simply set my brush mode back to normal for the layer mode and set my foreground color to plain white. After clicking in the middle of the current light burst you should see a nice gradation to white. Now we don’t want this perfect looking sphere shaped light burst showing up–we want it to be distorted, and for that you can use almost any of the distortion filters that Photoshop has to offer, but I recommend using a combination of the shear filter and the liquify filter.
After getting your gradient sheared to your liking, I recommend setting it’s layer mode to “lighten” and also duplicating the layer once and set that layer mode to “color burn” to give it a more intense look. (refer to PSD to see my final settings for this) I ended up duplicating my layer three times, and to make each layer unique I ran another filter, the liquify filter with these settings and adjusted my layer modes to give it the desired look.
At this point in the tutorial I’m not going to go into exact detail of each and every step because I’d be typing all day–the more you experiment with layer modes, masks, and layer modes the better the image usually turns out. I use a combination of all of those things to get to my final image as you’ll see in my final PSD which you can download here.
Add masks to light bursts for texture
After I get the desired intensity with my large light burst I merge those 3 layers and add a layer mask to hide certain areas of the burst that I don’t want. (Plus the source image appears to have a textured look to it) I select a dirty brush and paint a mask around desired areas of the image to hide/show more of the light burst. There are plenty of tutorials out there that teach you how to use masks and if you’re not using them along with custom brushes then I highly recommend you start doing that.
Rinse, Repeat, add color, use different distortion filters
In order to bring in some more color I’m going to repeat some of my earlier steps to make more lasers, except this time I’m going to use a purple color instead of blue, and instead of using the liquid filter, or the shear filter, I’m going to use the ocean ripple filter. First things first, you need to put your newly created lasers onto a black background so the distortion will work properly as I have outlined above. Then select the ocean ripple filter from the distort menu and apply something similar to the settings you see here:
The edges should be a bit rough looking and to smooth these out we’re going to slightly blur the ripples using the motion blur filter. Make sure to set the direction of the blur to mostly horizontal so it doesn’t lose it’s overall shape.
Experiment with your design!
To add some more volume to my composition I duplicate those new laser levels several times and experiment with different methods of transformation and layer modes/opacity.
Ultimately, the design is going to really come together in these phases and you’re not limited with what you can do. If at this time you wanted to completely change your design’s colors you could do so and continue on–or you can re-arrange the layers to get different effects on every layer.
Experiment! Save versions of your file so you can revert back in case you don’t like what you see. There’s been plenty of designs of mine that I worked on for several more hours and then ended up actually using a design that was done much earlier on in the process. (Look at our Radioactive II t-shirt design. It ended up being done alot sooner than I thought it was and I ended up throwing away what I had once thought was the “final” version.)
It’s hard to take your hands off the keyboard/mouse sometimes and actually decide when a design is done. This method of saving versions of your design is a great way to be able to look at your design later on with fresh eyes to see that maybe it was done a long time ago!
Clean it up! Accent the Focal Point!
Cleaning up your final composition and adding bits and pieces to the design is what’s going to give it it’s focal point, and if you haven’t been doing so already it can be really good to experiment with some of the same techniques using type. Before I get into adding type to my design, I’d like to touch upon adding a bit more variation to my color palette.
One thing I tend to notice about my design as it gets in the later stage is that I may want to add some variation in color to certain layers. The best way I find to do this is to utilize the clouds filter which I think is one of the most dynamic filters in Photoshop which is often under utilized by Photoshop n00bs.
To a beginner the clouds filter looks like just that, it makes pretty clouds, but once you learn how to use layer modes, masks, and custom brushes, the clouds filter can become your best friend for making your designs interesting and more dynamic. In this particular instance I’m going to use the clouds filter to add some more variation in color to my lasers by choosing a purple and a blue using the color picker tool for my foreground and background colors. After running the filter>render>clouds filter with purple and blue set as my foreground and background colors I decide to set my layer mode to overlay, and I also duplicate the layer and add a layer mask to it so that it’s hidden in various places. After getting the desired look that I’m happy with, I merge those two layers together.
Now that I have the desired color variation I want, it’s time to further emphasize the focal point, which in this case is Kendra the t-shirt girl. To bring more attention to her we’re going to duplicate her layer as you can see above and apply the layer mask to her. Your lower layer should no longer have the mask thumbnail next to it on your layers palette. This basically means nothing is being masked on your lower layer anymore.
You’re going to smudge using the smudge tool and a custom brush to give it the textured glow look that you see in the final image. If you’re not seeing the smudge’s show up outside of Kendra then you probably haven’t applied your layer mask and your smudges are getting hidden. make sure you’re smudging the bottom layer, so that the original Kendra image is on top.
You should see something similar to this:
Duplicate that smudged layer one more time and set that layer’s mode to color dodge:
Copy your layer style you created previously from one of our laser layers and paste that glow layer style onto your top original layer in this instance it’s called “Kendra Original”.
Add the finishing touches and details
I’ve been in the habit of adding little orbs to designs in this style so I create several new layers above and below my Kendra original image and use various custom brush settings to get some of those little orbs and light bursts surrounding my image and focal point.
Color correct and adjust your color palette!
The only other thing I can really think of to do on the image besides clean it up in various areas is to adjust the color of Kendra to match my color palette. To do that I’ll use some adjustment layers on my original Kendra layer (that still has a layer mask on it) The first type of adjustment layer I use is a curves layer:
You’ll also notice there are a few new items showing up here including some of my dynamic brush creations as well as some repetition of the purple lasers that I created before. One final thing to do is to add another adjustment layer which will add some blue hues to the original photo (Gradient Map):
Here’s the gradient settings I used:
Your layers window and image should look something like this now:
That’s about it for now. I’ve gone through and added some square looking brushes with brush dynamics.
I also added the name of my brand, Assault, to my image just because I like shamelessly plugging my product after writing these long tutorials. I’ve applied the following layer style to that layer to give it a similar neon look to it as well. (I’ve also applied a slight gaussian blur to soften the lettering)
Here’s the final image after cleaning up some of the layers and deleting some unwanted artifacts. I’ve also re-cropped the image because it felt nicer with a bit more head room for our center piece.
Conclusion
I’ve decided to post as much as I can from this tutorial so that if you knew 80% of what I covered you can at least benefit from my custom Photoshop brushes, or the original source psd of the graphic so you can see the actual layer breakdown I used to get to the final image. If you want to see some of the other tutorials I’ve written that I may have blazed past in this more advanced tutorial you can find links to them below.
While this may not be the EXACT process that was followed in our original inspirational material this is one of the many ways you could accomplish the same effect very quickly. Here are all of the files and links to my other helpful tutorials.
- Download the source PSD for this tutorial
- Download Custom Trendy Photoshop Brushes from this Tutorial
- Adobe Photoshop Brush Dynamics Tutorial
- Custom Photoshop Brushes Tutorial
- Additional Photoshop Tutorials
- Assault – Buy some t-shirts so I can start doing this thing full time!
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About the Author
Tim is the co-owner of Assault, and tends to think he can party twice as hard as anyone. Follow him on twitter @assault Email this Author | All posts by tim
Use trapcode plugin in after effect, and it will be sorted in minutes and much better looking!
super… looks really nice… as soon as i have time… i ll give it a shoot… thanks for putting it online.
Well if only I had after effects… This works much better I would think cause you have complete control over it and aren’t limited to rendering it all out in After Effects.
I’ve seen similar tutorials to this, but yours is the first one to really work on the concept of focusing upon the center of focus and working with the full design. You know how to teach people to think about the art rather than mimicking your behavior. Great tutorial and a beautiful end result.
[...] by step Photoshop tutorial on how to create those trendy light bursts and motion trails. View source Posted in : General Post statistics : 1 [...]
[...] le chemin à suivre pour vous rendre à ce tutorial, c’est par ici. Si l’article vous plais, partagez le [...]
nice tuts.its looking great.keep it up!!!
Ronald
[...] Trendy lightburst motion trail Photoshop tutorial (AssualtBlog) [...]
Interesting. Although, FYI – I didn’t use any special brushes or fancy effect filters though. Just good old fashioned grafting
I can make some perfect curves with pen tool. Please explain how to me.
[...] attempting to debunk how Tom Muller did some of his work for Wired magazine I decided to ask him a few additional [...]
sweet tutorial! thanks!
[...] public links >> graphicdesign Trendy lightburst motion trail Photoshop tutorial | T-Shirt Blog -… Saved by timcaffine on Sat 04-10-2008 The (New) World of Graphic Design Saved by Alterion on Sat [...]
What photoshop is this created on because i have 7.0 on microsoft but doesnt seem to work?
I just wanted to thank you for your very easy to follow tutorial on a difficult subject: Pen Tool! (lots of failure in this area). And I was able to create the exact wave I needed for a book cover.
I’m pretty sure I made this on Photoshop CS3. @mike
Glad you found i thelpful @rory!
i cant get the lines to fade at both ends of my brush stroke , wat is you settings
?
or how did you do that ?
You have to make sure to have the box checked to simulate brush pressure, and the brush has to be somewhat wide–aka it won’t work with a 6px brush, you need like a 15-20px brush (I believe.)
[...] standard blur and transform tools) — unlike Tim at Assault, who went out of his way trying to recreate the effect [...]
Hi
The source PSD isnt working. Please fix that. Thanks
Links should work again, sorry for the problems I don’t know what’s up with WP these days.
[...] How to make those trendy lasers and light bursts in Photoshop [...]
NASTY TUTORIAL TAUGHT ME ALOT I DIDNT KNOW THANKS MATE
[...] Trendy Lightburst Motion Trail [...]
[...] Trendy Lightburst Motion Trail Photoshop Tutorial [...]