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Electrifying Glow Album ArtIntroduction

This tutorial is a bit involved and assumes that you are prof icient enough in Photoshop to f ollow alongwithout me holding your hand. That being said, lets jump right in.

Step 1

I took this photo at a show The Killers played at Madison Square Garden in New York this past summer…packed house, great crowd… anyway, here’s the photo. The image is included in the lesson f ilesavailable f or download at the end of the tutorial.

Lets f irst start by drawing a nice curvy path with the pen tool that we’ll use as our main wrapping glowline. In the Paths palette be sure to rename the path so you don’t loose it when we create a new one.

Step 2

Create a new layer called "First Stroke" and switch to the Brush tool. Choose the 5 pixel round brush withhard edges, set the f oreground color to white and click back to the Pen tool. Now simply Right-Click(Mac: Control-Click) anywhere on the path and choose Stroke Path. When the dialog box pops upchoose Brush and Simulate Pressure. The pressure simulation will ensure that the stroke tapers of f at

each end.

Step 3

With your tool of choice remove the sections along the stroke that should be behind your subject. I usethe Pen tool.

Step 4

Add an Inner and Outer Glow as shown below. The blue color I’m using in both styles is #6d9bf f . This willbe the only layer style we’ll be using and we’ll copy and paste this one onto subsequent layers as we go.

Step 5

Duplicate the "First Stroke" layer, clear the layer styles and add a 6px Gaussian Blur. This will add anadditional glowing ef f ect around the original stroke.

Step 6

Create a new layer called "Particles", activate the Path we created earlier and switch to the Brush tool.Choose a round brush of 3 pixels with a hardness of 0%, then under the Brushes palette set ShapeDynamics and Scattering to the f ollowing. (*note: make sure your f oreground color is still white)

Step 7

Switch back to the Pen tool and stroke the path just like bef ore, then remove the overlapping sections.This t ime the eraser tool will probably be the easiest way to remove the overlapping dots.

Copy the layer style f rom the "First Stroke" layer and paste them into the "Particles" layer. (*note: Thiscan be done easily by holding down the Option (PC: Alt) key while clicking and dragging the style iconf rom one layer to the other.)

Step 8

Create a new layer called "Second Stroke", create a new path similar but not the same as the original withthe Pen tool (or duplicate the earlier path and change it a lit t le) then repeat steps 2-5 but this t ime use a3 pixel brush and reduce your Gaussian Blur to 3 on the copy layer. Play with a lower opacity on theselayers until the ef f ect looks right to you and don’t f orget to copy the layer style onto the "SecondStroke" layer.

Step 9

Now that the glow ef f ects have been completed it ’s t ime to really have some f un with this image.

Click on the Background layer and duplicate it by pressing Command-J (PC: Ctrl-J). ChooseImage>Adjustments>Threshold f rom the main menu and use a setting around 85. This will obviously varydepending on your application of the technique.

Step 10

Grab the Magic Wand tool by pressing W and then click anywhere in the f ield of black. This may not haveselected all the black if there are isolated pockets so choose Select>Similar f rom the main menu toensure all the black pixels are selected.

Invert the selection by pressing Command-Shif t- I (PC: Ctrl-Shif t- I) then drag the layer to the trash andselect the Background layer. (*note: your selection will still be active.

Step 11

Duplicate the selected area by pressing Command-J (PC: Ctrl-J). This will create a new layer with just theselection copied onto it. Call this layer "Partial".

The selection will be gone and it won’t look like anything has happened, so create a new layer betweenthe "Partial" layer and the "Background" layer, call it "Black" and f ill the entire layer with black.

Step 12

Click back to the "Partial" layer and use the eraser to remove all those annoying artif acts outside theartwork that we want to keep.

Step 13

For my f inished image I added the graphic as an CD album cover.