Twirls & light Photoshop tutorial

Twirls & light tutorial by Shriek.

In this tutorial you will learn you how to make some nice twirls and lights

1. Open a new file with some nice clouds

2. Now edit your image a bit with the Brightness/Contrast tool (Image, Adjustments, Brightness/Contrast) and play a bit with the settings, everyone got his own taste.

3. Sharpen the picture (Filter, Sharpen). You can use here the easy 'sharpen' setting, or to choose your own with 'Unsharp mask' or 'Smart Sharpen' in CS2.

4. Duplicate the image, blur it (filter, blur, gaussian blur) and change the blendmode to softlight/overlay to get some better colors.

5. Now flatten the image (Layer, Flatten Image).

So now we got a background and we can start with the twirls.

6. Make a new layer with a small white line in the center. Now make a little triangle of it with the 'Polygonal Lasso Tool' . Just draw a triangle, inverse the selection (Select, Inverse) and erase it or press 'Delete'.

7. Now do this also with two other lines with different sizes.

8. Twirl your lines a bit with the shear filter (Filter, Distort, Shear) and rotate them a bit (Edit, Transform, Rotate).
*You get the nicest twirls if you center your line when you're going to use the shear filter.

9. Duplicate and transform some of the twirls to get more of them.

10. Change the blendmode of some twirls and add innerglow/outerglow to all of them to get some more different colors.

11. Now we're going to make some light. Make two circles, a little and a big one and fill them with white. Center them both.

12. Select the small one and blur it (Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur) and move it to the bottom.

13. Now select the big circle and set the Fill to 0% (this is only possible in CS1/2) and outerglow to overlay/white/40%/25px and move it also to the bottom.

You can also change the blendmode of this circle to get different effects.

Now we are going to make some little lines for some extra detail.

14. Open a new file of 1px height and 5px width. Make a new layer and delete the background. Draw a 1px white dot in the left corner and save this as a pattern (edit, define pattern).

15. Now open a new file with a black background and fill a new layer with the pattern you just made so it's full with lines.

16. Go to filter > distort > polar coordinates, set it to 'Rectangular to Polar' and hit 'ok'.

17. Copy this layer and paste it in your file with the clouds and twirls. Move it to the bottom, change the blendmode and erase the top and center with an soft brush.

The final part

18. Make a new purple circle on a new layer, blur it (filter, distort, gaussian blur), set the blendmode to overlay, move it down your file and set it as your second layer in your layerswindow.

19. Flatten all the layers together and finished.

I don't like this image, but it's just for practice to teach you the tricks.

You still can edit your pic now with better colors, sharpen it, more details, ...

Twirls & light tutorial by Shriek.

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