In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to create colorful abstract spray effect for use in your graphics. This has become quite a trendy technique recently, and can be accomplished fairly easily.
Where to use this effect
This is a great post-effect for your compositions, so you’ll probably want to use it towards the completion of your works.
For this demonstration, I’ve prepared a Photoshop Document (1.35 Mb) that you may choose to use to practice this technique on.
This effect generally looks best when it takes on the appearance of emerging from behind an object. We are going to have the spray come out from behind the cloud in our example. If you’re following along in the Photoshop Document provided above, you’ll want to work in new layers under the “Cloud” layer, but above the background.
Setting up the Brush
The spray effect does not require you to go out and download any new Brushes, but we will need to adjust some of the brush options to get the right effect. You’ll want to be using a nice soft brush (the standard brush set to 0% hardness, and a large size works well), and you’re going to want to set the Brush mode to Dissolve (The Brush mode is located in the options bar. This is not the blending mode in the layers panel.) Also, set your brush’s Opacity to something around 50% (The Lower the opacity, the less dust/spray you’ll get).
Playing with Color
When using this effect, it is important to select colors that are bright, and vibrant with color. Of course, there are always exceptions to this rule, and you’ll ultimately have to pick colors that work with the rest of your composition, but as rule of thumb, colors that work best include white, yellow, magenta, purple, cyan, pink, etc. Generally anything with a high luminance level will work well.
There are cases when dark colors can work, but I’ll leave that up to you for experimenting.
For starters, lets select a Foreground Color of White, and get to the brushing!
The Technique in Action
Starting in a layer underneath your object of choice (In our case, the cloud layer), start brushing with single clicks around the edges of the foreground object.
At this point, the specks don’t seem much like spray at all, but more like extraneous pixels floating about. To fix this, we are going to resize this layer. Go to Edit > Transform > Scale, or Ctrl + T, and then make the layer smaller by dragging the corner selection nodes inward (hold shift to keep constrained proportions). Resizing to 80% of the original layer size should be sufficient.
Resizing the layer gives the effect of varying brightness and size of the individual pixels which were very uniform before.
Fading the Specks Away
I find that this effect looks nicer when the spray seems to fade out rather than just disappear along a rounded edge. To do this, grab your Eraser tool from the toolbar, and set up a nice large soft brush (0% hardness, 100-300px).
Erase some of the dust so that it seems to have varying volume in different parts of the layer, and also try to have it fade out the spray as it gets close to the edge.
Blending the Spray
Sometimes, changing the blending mode of a spray layer will greatly alter the effect of the spray. Blending modes like Overlay, Linear Dodge, Color Dodge, and Screen seem to work best in most cases.
Furthermore, by Duplicating and Erasing Parts of each of the duplicated layers can also make for some excellent effects.
New Layer > Repeat
You know everything you need to know now to create some great spray effects! All you need to do now is repeat the steps shown above several times with new layers (With different color sprays of course), and blend all of the different spray layers together until you get the desired result.
Additional Tips
- To make some dust particles appear more sharp than others, brush over some spray with the Sharpening tool.
- Add in some Large Specks every now and then with a small brush (not set to Dissolve).
- Don’t spray TOO MUCH! Just enough in some areas to make the effect noticeable. Too much and the whole effect might be lost.
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Good tutorial for tip many beginners want to know, without giving them the easiest way.
Thanks mate!
In my opinion, this is the easiest way to accomplish the effect. You could also use radial gradients set to dissolve for the same effect (and by doing so, create multi-color sprays), but with a brush, you get some idea of where you are going to be brushing.
Really nice tutorial will definitely be using this on a wallpaper I may be making soon
Thanks Matt,
This is a great effect for wallpapers. I’ve made a nice Tutorial9 Wallpapers that I may upload with this effect.
This is a nice effect. I always thought people used splatter brushes when doing something to this effect; I could never find a proper use for the dissolve feature.
Another great guide.
fairly easy but still some basic stuff
Yea rarely do I find a use for the dissolve feature but this is definitely a useful technique.
pretty sweet tutorial, I really like how it pops the image you provided. Plus, on a side note, i really love the logo for this site… so simple yet effective and versitile. Keep the tutorials coming.
Simple but Very USeful! Thanks
Another great tutorial. Thank you.
Hey david how do you make the cool lines in the back round in the pic shown above…e-mail me back at dillyrocker@msn.com
I’ve started using a different method with CS3. I make a layer with the dissolve blend mode, and then pant on in normally with different colours. Then I put it in a smart layer and set the blend mode to overlay or screen or whatever. Then I run a slight gaussian blur on it.
This has the advantage of being easily adjustable. (like, say, adjusting the opacity of the dissolve to lessen the amount of spray)
Great tutorial!
When I used this tutorial, I resized the layer down to 70%-80%, accepted the transform, but the pixels did not soften, since the layer is still dissolve and will only display hard pixels in that mode. I think a tiny step was left out.
To get this to work I created a new empty layer under the dissolve layer, merged the dissolve layer down onto it (Layer–>Merge down). Then I transformed that layer and the pixels were successfully softened slightly.
@ Gabriel - It sounds to me like you set your layer blending mode to “Dissolve” rather than your Brush Mode as suggested in the article. Either way works, but like you mentioned, you’re way will require an additional step of merging your dissolve layer onto a blank “Normal” layer.
I learn something new today! thanks!
NICE.
This is my favorite tutorial site for Photoshop. Not only are the tutorials very well laid out and easy to understand, but the person writing them has great talent, and inspires me to try new things!
That’s great that these are free, but I’d love to purchase a textbook of these to carry around with me!
All of the tutorials here are very helpful, I’m glad I found this site. I like how everything is explained very detailed and you can also do it yourself by following the steps. It makes it a lot easier to remember.
Very nice tuts! Thanks!