Advance Glow Effect

In this tutorial, we’re going to create some really sharp-looking glow effects using a combination of layer styles, the Pen Tool and Color Blending. The end effect is quite stunning and hopefully you’ll pick up some tips you didn’t know before.

First create a new document of size 6 by 4 measured in inches with the resolution of 100 px per inch.
Then we begin with a radial gradient. This one is pretty harsh and goes from a reddish brown color to black. Here are the exact color codes:
Foreground color – #922f00
Background color – #000000

In this tutorial, we actually need a pretty intense center, so what we’ll do is duplicate the layer we just made and set the one above to a blending mode of Color Dodge. There are a few types of blending modes, darkening ones, lightening ones, colorizing ones and inverting ones. Color Dodge is probably the strongest of the lightening ones. As you can see in the screenshot, it produces a pretty full-on center.

Now before we can start making glows, we need to have something to glow. Here’s where we break out the pen tool. If you have used the pen tool much I suggest playing around with it a little. There are some tricky things you can do with shortcuts, but for this tutorial you don’t need those.
In fact all we want to achieve are some nice curves. Fortunately this isn’t too hard. I find the trick is not to use too many points. Instead rely on the Pen Tool’s natural curving and drag the mouse out for each point so you get a big angle. In this S-curve shown above, I’ve only used three points, the starting point, the end point and one in between to give it the bend.

Once you have a nice curve, create a new layer. Then click on the Paintbrush Tool (B) and choose a very thin hard brush as shown in the figure. As you know, soft brushes are blurry ones and hard brushes are more solid. In this case I must suggest using a thickness of 3.
Note that you can have any color selected as your brush color because we’ll go over it with a layer style shortly.

Now switch back to the Pen Tool. You must switch tools in order to do this next bit.
Then right-click and select Stroke Path. A little dialog box will appear as in the screenshot. Choose Brush and make sure there is a tick next to Simulate Pressure. This is important as it will give your curve tapered ends which will make it rock!

You should now have something like the above. Just a thin, cool swishy thing.

Now to remove the path, just right click on anywhere on the path and click on remove path. You should see the result like below.

Now add some layer properties to the layer. Apply Drop Shadow and Outer glow as give in the figure below.


You will the get the result like below.

Similarly, create other different curves with different brush size as you wish. I have created the curves like below.

Here I have added two text layers as ADVANCED and GLOW. One is smaller and another is big in size with different font styles. You can apply any font styles as you want.

Now add layer properties to both text layers. Apply Stroke and outer glow. Apply stroke color and the glow color as orange.


You will get the result as below.

Now that’s looking pretty cool, but it will look even cooler if we give it some subtle coloring instead of this super gaudy red.
So create a new layer, and using a radial gradient, draw a yellow to transparent gradient as shown in figure.

Now decrease the opacity of the gradient layer to 19, less or more.

Similarly add another two layers with blue and pink foreground colors to transparent gradient that will result as below;

Now to add the rendering effect;

Click on the background layer which is at the last level.
Go to Filter à render à lens flare;
You will see the window as below. Click on ok.

Final result: