Light and glow effect

In this Photoshop effect tutorial I cover the creation of several different light and glow effects in Photoshop. In this tutorial we are going to recreate picture 1. The effects in picture 1 consist of smoke, light trails, sparkles, stars and bokeh effects. Luckily it's pretty simple to create each of these effects in Photoshop.

Picture 1.

Smoke Effect in Photoshop

Picture 2. Overlay blending mode.

Picture 3. Colorful smoke effect in Photoshop.

Let's start with the smoke effect in the background. The smoke effect is created by rendering clouds and coloring them with an overlay layer:

Create a new image document (600x500px).

Fill the background with black color (Edit > Fill...)

Create a new empty layer (Layer > New > Layer...) and select it.

Use Elliptical Marquee Tool and make the following selection to the center of the image: Width: 350px Height: 250px Feather: 80px

(you can set these values in the options-panel in the top of the screen when the Elliptical Marquee Tool is selected.)

Select black as foreground color and white as background color. Create clouds into the selection (Filter > Render > Clouds). (Clouds are rendered randomly. If you are not satisfied with the clouds you can just click undo and render them again.)

Create a new empty layer on top of the clouds layer and select it. Change the blending mode of the layer to Overlay like in picture 2.

Select #06c2ff as foreground color and #00ff7d as background color. Use Gradient Tool and fill the new layer with gradient. The result should be similar to picture 3.