How to Create Cool Light Effects in Photoshop

Step 1

Open your model stock in Photoshop. You will not need to subtract it from it’s background unless you want to add something that requires that. The first thing I did was to make some general adjustments to the image using Adjustment Layers. I added the default purple-orange Gradient Map, set its Blend Mode to Linear Dodge (Add) and Opacity 10%. Then I increased the Saturation to 25 on a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer.

Step 2

I started by making a light ball. For that I used a stock photo made by myself. So open powerball.jpg scale it down and increase the Saturation. Change the blend mode to Screen so that you hide the black background. Once you have the stock image ready, get a big soft brush and paint two big dots and change the blend mode to Overlay. I used yellow and blue to match the colors of the stock image.

Step 3

At this point this doesn’t really look very good so I added some more details. Create the glow of the ball using a big soft brush and an orange color. I changed the blend mode to Pin Light and reduced the Opacity to 50%. This is very important because if you don’t create this, the Outerglow of the little dots shown on the next image will not be visible or will not look right.
Keep in mind that depending on the colors of your stock image, you might have to use different blend modes. Blend modes work differently depending on the colors and illumination. The dots are made using a custom scattered brush and with the Noise option activated. The blend mode of the outer glow is Color Dodge.

As you see on the powerball dots layer, the nice outerglow around the small dots is visible because of the big orange glow light.
In order to give more consistence and shape to this ball, I made some lines using the Pen Tool (P). I took a 2 pixels hard brush then I traced some arc paths and stoke those paths with the brush using the Simulate Pressure option. After creating 5 or 6 curved lines, you can duplicate them and rotate them, nobody will notice they are duplicated.

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