Add Glints of Light to Your Images

Photoshop can be used not only for color correction but also for creating some mind-boggling special effects. Here, we show how you can create starburst glints in images in a few, simple steps

Thursday, September 06, 2007

Scanned images and those taken with digital cameras, need a lot of color correction before they can be put to any meaningful use such as publishing in a magazine or on a Web page. Giving lighting effects to an image reduces the efforts for color adjustment. Moreover, the variation in color does not remain noticeable, especially in case of dark images. So, photographers or image editors use special lighting effects to suppress problematic areas in images. Glinting Starburst Effect in Photoshop is one such lighting effect that lets you hide odd color variations in a single image.

For creating the Starburst Effect, you need to use only a few tools such as Line, Marquee, and one or two Blur filters. This effect is best suited for evening party pictures, birthday party images, candle light dinner images and images with a dark background.

This image is a little dark, especially the background portion. To make it bright and attractive, we shall put glints of light on the black, round boxes on the wall	Create a new document of approximately 200-300 pixels. Fill the background with any dark color, say black. This would ensure that glints of light are clearly visible

Select and hold the rectangle tool for a while. Now, in the pop-up window, select the Line tool. In the Option bar on top, set the line weight as two pixels	Put one cm wide guidelines on both sides and draw a one cm wide, white line inside them. Select >Filter >Blur >Motion Blur and set the distance angle between 60–90 pixels

Duplicate the layer with the line and rotate this layer. Select Edit >Transform>Rotate option to transform the selected area to a square. Rotate the square by 90 degrees	Select and merge both layers. Now, duplicate this merged layer. Select the new layer and go to Edit >Transform >Rotate to rotate it by 45 degrees; make it smaller by 50 percent

To add a Lens Flare filter, create a new layer and select the elliptical Marquee tool from the tool box. Select the Starburst Effect and then select >Edit >Stroke	Now go to >Filter >Blur >Gaussian Blur to soften the lens effect. Here we used one pixel radius. You can increase the radius to 3 pixels depending on the size of your final image

Select all layers except the background and merge them.Select the layer one, and copy-paste the layer to the final image. Adjust the Starburst Effect as per background	Copy the layer one and paste it to each box in the background. Select background and make shadow/highlight and brightness/contrast adjustments. Your image is now ready

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