Creating Atmospheric Effects In Digital Paintings With Photoshop Techniques – Follow along as I teach you how to create lighting effects and lights in Photoshop! Learn how to create a glowing circle effect, how to blend it into an image, and how to add the effect to Photoshop Transform!
We’d love to see what you create with the techniques discussed in this tutorial! Send us your custom glitter effects for a chance to be featured on this page and social media.
Creating Atmospheric Effects In Digital Paintings With Photoshop Techniques
Use the images included in the tutorial download, free stock photos from Pexels.com or Unsplash.com, or your own photos (make sure they’re family-friendly!).
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Creating special effects in Photoshop is a lot of fun, and it also results in beautiful images. The best thing about glow effects is that they can be added to almost any image, like the one we created in this tutorial.
Take a look at the picture we used as an example. This is a simple, well composed photo of a woman practicing yoga and meditation. There’s no way to use effects to spice things up a bit, right?
Since we want a shadow effect, we know we will add a light source to the image. If you want a new light source to stand out, it often helps to darken other images.
Create an adjustment layer, place it above the background image, and drag the resulting brightness slider to the left.
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This reduces the overall brightness of the image, which ultimately helps soften the effect. This gave us the opportunity to add more ambient lighting around the model to add to the overall atmosphere.
Our goal in this painting is to create a circle of glowing energy around the subject in the painting. So for starters you need a ring.
To shape the ring, grab the Ellipse tool, hold down the SHIFT key and drag the circle to maintain a perfect circle. Make sure the fill is set to none and the stroke is set to the desired color for the glow effect (you can change this later).
Once you’ve created a circle, you can use the Move tool to adjust its position or change the options as needed.
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It’s always good practice to leave a reference to any original assets you created. When you’re happy with the color and location of the circle, repeat. Right-click on the duplicate and choose Rasterize Layer. This will be the layer where we will start creating the effect.
Go ahead and hide the original layer so we can save it later.
Now that we have the base of our light ring, we will duplicate this layer as a group, using blurs and blending modes to create the effect.
Don’t worry about making it too strong. We repeat this process again and again, increasing the intensity of the disturbance at each step.
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To add natural variation to the shadow effect, create a layer mask for each ring layer and use a large, soft brush set to paint random spots black. It’s very subtle, but it makes the overall effect very natural.
As you continue adding new ring layers with different opacity levels, try changing the blending mode of each one as well. We found that the screen produces a nice lighting effect, so it should be yours.
However, you can experiment with others and see what happens. We’ve found that layering is a compound effect of cool particles that we can add later.
When using a normal blend mode like Dissolve, it often helps to create a new effect layer that can be set as a normal blend mode.
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To copy the effects of the Dissolve blending mode, it just needs a way to select all the particles it creates. Place a solid black fill layer behind the dissolve layer.
Then select the color level and choose the color of the glow effect. Once the selection is working, create a new layer and fill the selection with the color you are using to create the glowing ring.
You’ll complete the new layer with a copy of the Dissolve blending mode effect. Go ahead and delete the original layer that we set to blending mode – it’s not necessary.
As we did with the other glowing rings, go ahead and add a Gaussian blur to the diffuse effect to help it blend in more naturally with the image.
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Continue to duplicate the layer (or the entire group) and play with the blur and blend modes to dial in the lighting effect you want.
Now that our glowing ring is almost complete, let’s merge it into the image so that it’s behind the theme.
We shouldn’t be able to see where the ring goes around the wall. To do this, we can create and use the option to mask themes by removing the rings from those areas.
Gather all the shiny rings together and then hide the group. Zoom in a bit on the subject, then “Select” and choose “Color Range.” Select black from the theme dresser and swipe until the theme is quite clear.
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Now with the glowing ring group visible, load the active selection of that group into the group’s layer mask. You should see something like this:
The choice looks good, but it is opposite to what we expected. Paste the layer mask you just created with CTRL or CMD + I.
We have a beautiful glowing ring that appears to be floating behind this wall. However, if we want it to look realistic, we have to combine the light in the ring with the light in the image.
This requires a little manual work with conversion tools, but the benefits are worth it! Zoom in on the image and begin to lightly trace the edges of the object with bright colors taken from the light circle. The goal is to create some colored highlights around the circle so that it looks like the light is wrapped around the wall.
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Allow extra time when working with sensitive areas like hair. The more soft, natural-looking highlights you add, the better the overall effect will be.
Spend as much or as little time as you want on this part, but the more you pay attention, the more realistic everything will seem.
After doing the small details, we can add a larger soft shadow effect around the subject. Again, use a large, soft brush and a low-flow brush to paint larger spots at the edges of the wall.
Then, use Blend to make sure that these highlights are the only natural highlights in the photo.
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We did it. We’ve done a good job of incorporating themes and lighting effects, but we need to pay more attention to the environment and other backgrounds. It makes sense that the shiny ring would create reflections and light around the subject.
To do this, add a group of all the glowing rings, then reposition them until they match the natural visible area of ββthe surface.
Then use the Brush tool to improve the effect by painting black on the layer mask.
Custom Photoshop brushes are a great way to add special effects. In particular, random brushes are a great way to create particle effects and atmospheric effects, as we can create randomness and natural variations within the brushes themselves.
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You can follow the video to see how we create our custom brush, but if you want to skip the process, the conversion tutorial is available for free as a download.
Now that we’re done with most of the effects, let’s zoom in and look at the image. Here we want the glow effect to be more or less intense and it can be adjusted accordingly.
You can add a Gaussian blur to a new duplicate layer, change the blending mode, and use a layer mask to add some variation in intensity to different points of the image.
When you’re finished, you should have a natural shimmering effect that takes the original photo to an amazing new place!
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But it doesn’t stop there! Whether you’re creating a special effect or combining multiple photos, adding some color on top of everything can help bring them all together.
For quick and effective color changes, try using the Color Balance adjustment layer to drag and drop the color of the image until you get an image you like.