Magical Lighting Effect in Photoshop

lightning effectSince our last article on how to give cool retro analog effect generated lots of traffic, I decided to write another one on some of the Photoshop effects. So, today I want to show how to create a nice light and magic effect.


Step 1
Create a radial gradient, of really a dark color which you want.

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Step 2
Then add any cool icon of magic hat.

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Step 3
Add some text and apply the Distort >Wave filter. Create two lines of text.

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Step 4
Rotate and place the text.

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Step 5
Add some light using glow: Use unlike values for each line of text. Here is the blending option Color Dodge. Change the values of Spread, Size and Rang.

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Step 6
Group the 2 lines of texts and with one apply a mask to make the stripes disappear at their ends.

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Step 7
With the other group of text apply a Gaussian Blur effect, after that remove some parts to show the non-blurry text.

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Step 8
After that create a new layer below the text and with a regular big brush like 100px add a spot of light in white. The new layer created must be below the text; otherwise the shine will not affect the white spot.

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Step 9
Make some smoke again using eraser tool.

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Step 10
Then create a cloud using marquee with feather set to a value bigger than 20 and apply the render > clouds holding the command key (for Mac user), ctrl key (windows user).

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Step 11
Then create the sparks using a brush, play with the shape dynamics, scattering, and other dynamics. After that, apply an Outer Glow to create the magic effect.

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Final Step
At the result you will find a really simple but beautiful magical lighting effect.

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Download PSD file – Magical Lightning Effect in Photoshop