Complicated World, Simple Solutions…

Simplify your life, your business and your world.

Bring your flat images to life with this quick and easy neon glow tutorial! Here you will learn how to utilize and get to know some basic tools to create this stunning effect.

*here’s the graphic we will be working with. simply save it to your computer and upload it to photoshop

Once that’s done, create a new layer and place it on the bottom. this is going to be the background layer.  when that’s created, select “edit” and “fill” from the toolbar. Fill the entire background with black

Now select the layer with the curve image and copy it onto another layer. You can do this by clicking and dragging the layer to the “new layer” icon in the layers palette. The copied layer will automatically appear above its original layer.

Turn off the layer with the original image by click on the eye icon to the left of the layer in the layer palette (you may want to hold on to the original image, just in case) and select the new, copied version. go to the layer option in the toolbar, open “layer style” and select “outer glow”. This will open the style palette, where you’ll be controlling the glow affect. (You can also access the style palette by double clicking the layer, and selecting “outer glow” from the side menu).

While you should already be working within the “outer glow” option, double check by making sure it’s highlighted from the side menu to the left. Here you will set the color of your glow, opacity and size. For this layer, set the opacity to 30%, spread to 10% and size to 50 px.

Set the color for your glow by double clicking the swatch located under “structure”.  Set the color to #43ffc8

Now that you have your outer glow set, select the “inner glow” option beneath outer glow in the side menu (everything should look pretty familiar at this point).  Change the blend mode from “screen” to “vivid light” using the drop down menu. Then change the opacity to 100 %, size to 40 px, and color to #2cab9e (swatches are changed in the same way, by double clicking the swatch and placing the code in the color picker)

At this point, you should have something that looks a lot like this

Now copy the layer you were just working on (with the inner and outer glow added) onto another layer. Make sure this layer is sitting on top of the one you were just working on. (You can name the layers to avoid confusion if it helps).  Double click the layer you just created to access the layer style palette, and turn off the outer glow setting from the previous layer (this is done by simply unchecking the box)

Now select (you guessed it) the inner glow option, and change the size to 27 px, and color swatch to #38d8c7. Everything else can stay the same from the previous settings.

Finally, change the opacity of this layer to 54% so that the first layer shows through some more.  This option is on the top of your layers palette.

Now for the final layer.  Turn on the original image you placed (remember when I mentioned it was a good idea to save it?) and copy that image onto another layer. Drag that layer so that it sits 3rd down from the top. Turn off the layer with the original image (once again) and select your new, copied layer.

Select your final layer (which you see here is labeled “Gaussian blur”) go to “filter” from the toolbar, scroll down to “blur” and select “Gaussian blur” (imagine that…).  Set the Gaussian blur radius to 56.1 px.

Now for the last step, go to “image” in the toolbar, scroll to “adjustments” and select “hue/saturation”. This will bring up the hue/saturation palette. From here, change the hue to +118, saturation to -17, and lightness to -13. (Easiest way to do this is to punch in these numbers where there are zeros.

Click “ok” when finished, and voilà! Turn on your layers (if they weren’t on already – WITH THE EXCEPTION if the flat, originally placed image) and admire your handy work. Easy, right?

Mastering this will open up possibilities for your future Photoshop projects. Check out the examples below for inspiration, and stay tuned for some more tutorials!

the first two pictures where created using the “real smoke” brush, which you can download for free by clicking here.

Tags: glow, neon, photoshop, tutorial

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 7th, 2010 at 3:46 pm and is filed under Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.