How to Create an Easy Glow Effect in Photoshop 2022

Create an Easy Glow Effect in Photoshop

In this Photoshop Tutorial I will show you how to make an object glow in photoshop. You will see 3 examples of the glow effect in photoshop. Make any object have that glowing light. Create an easy glow effect in Photoshop.

How to Add the Glow Effect to Car Head Lights

In this example, we have this classic car and we’re going to make the headlights glow. First thing we’re going to do is we’re going to make it look like it’s nighttime.

So in our Layers panel, we’re going to come here to the adjustment layers and click on color lookup. We’re going to click on the load 3D Lut here and we have a lookup table night from day. We’re going to remove some of the saturation and just some of the lightness in that color. So we’re going to come down here to the Layers panel and we’re going to select a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, bring the saturation down a little bit and adjust the lightness a little.

And now we’re going to add a blank layer. We’re going to start working on the headlights. Now we’re going to select our brush tool, and we’re going to make sure that we’re on a soft round brush and come over here to our foreground color. We’re going to set that and you can set it to any color you want.

Something that would resemble light can type in FFC682, we’ll use that color. Say, okay. We’ll name this layer, light one and you can use the right bracket key to make the size of your brush big and with your opacity at 100 and your flow at 100. All you need to do is just click on the light.

Something like that. We’ll do both light at the same time. And click something like that. Nn our light one layer, we’re going to change the blending mode to Linear Dodge add, so we’ll come down to Linear Dodge ad and we’ll double click on our light one layer and bring up our layer styles. And right here, where it says Transparency shapes.

Layer uncheck that. And say, okay, I’m going to have more light layers. So I’m going to put them on a group. I’m going to say Command G and name this group lights, anything we do to the lights will be in this group. I’m going to add another blank layer. I’m going to call it light two. And right away I’m going to change the blending mode to linear dodge add. I’m going to double click, bring up my layer styles and uncheck transparency shapes layer and say, okay. I’m going to duplicate this layer two more times.

Command J is one, there’s two. I’m going to rename one of these layers Reflection light, and the other one light flare. So we have four layers in this lights group. Right now I’m going to turn off the light flare layer and the reflection light and select light two and we’re going to expand the light in the headlights. I’m going to use my right bracket and make my brush bigger and click on the light.

Click on the other light. I’m going to turn down the opacity on that layer to something like 60 or so. Now I’m going to make the reflection layer visible. Now let’s work on making a reflection. Probably going to get some reflection here on the bumper and under the lights. So I’m going to turn on the reflection layer and paint here on the bumper where there may be some reflection, maybe a little reflection under here, maybe some over here, maybe a little over here.

Now, we’re going to blend this in a little bit. We double click on the reflection light layer in with our layer styles will come down here to blend F and we’ll move the slider over here on the left. Remove that from the shadows. We hit alt or option to split this. And you can adjust here depending on how much of the shadow that you want to see.

And something like this. There’s the before and there is the after on our reflection. Now we need to work on some more light flare around the outside of the light. Also, any light flare that might come down here in the street in front of the car. So I’ll I turn on the light flare layer, select that, make my brush pretty big out here.

Click there, click here. And we’ve got some light flare going on. And to spread out the light flare a little bit more. We might want to transform this hit command T and hold shift plus option and bring this out a little bit like this just a little bit click on my checkmark and now we want to draw a shape for the flare that might come down to the street to match the direction of the light from the headlight kind of wide and pointing down.

So right now I’m going to turn off the light flare layer. I’m going to use my polygonal lasso tool and just kind of draw down here something like this. I’m going to make my light flare layer visible, and I’m going to give it a layer mask. I’ll click on my layer mask and come up to the properties.

And I’m going to increase the feathering to something right around there. Yours maybe a little bit different. And then on that layer by light flare layer, I’m going to change the fill of the opacity. I’m going to change the fill to about 40%. There’s the before and there’s after. So you see I have some directional light coming down a little bit there in the front of the car, under the street and down here in the sides.

And now here’s where you can get a little bit more creative and finish it off. I think I want to add another color. Look up in this one here. I want to add a little bit of warmth. So I’m going to add a soft warming look. Yeah, it’s kind of a subtle warming look. I can drop the opacity just a little bit.

And next, I mean, add a curves adjustment layer. Just add a little bit of contrast to the image. Slight S-curve. Yes, definitely. Like a little contrast there. And now here is the before and here is the after.

How to Add the Glow Effect to a Street Light

In this next example, we’re going to make this first lamp glow right here. We are going to select the lamp, zoom in here and you can use any selection tool.

I’m going to use the polygonal lasso tool and just do this kind of loosely here. I’m going to hold down the shift key. And you can see that the polygonal lasso tool now has a plus sign. So that means I could add to the selection here. So I’m just going to go around to the areas where there’s glass and or selection is going to be done right here.

Okay, so we selected all the glass. I could zoom back out. I will put the lamp selection on its own layer and hit command j. Before I go any further with putting the glow effect on the lamp, I want to do something with this background, so I want to make it darker. There are many ways to do this.

I’m going to use a color lookup and use the day from night one to take a little bit of that saturation under the background image. So I come back down to the Layers panel, make a hue and saturation adjustment layer, take my saturation down and you can play with the lightness here to see what level you want to put that out.

I think that is good right there. And now we can go back to working on the lamp. We will name this layer lamp. It will make it a smart object. We’re going to change the blending mode on the lamp layer to the Linear Dodge Add. On our lamp layer, we’re going to add a blur. We’ll come up to Filter Blur, Gaussian blur, and we’re going to make this around 2.

And now we want to work on the lens flare of the lamp. We’re going to create a blank layer and I want to fill that with black. So I’ll come up to edit fill and fill with black. I’ll change the blending mode to color dodge, and I’m going to rename this layer light, I want to also convert this to a smart object.

Now I’m going to add another filter and go to filter render lens flare. For lens type I’m going to check 105 millimeter prime and I have my brightness at 110 and I position will my lens flare. I don’t need any actual flare. So I will center of the lens flare right in the middle and say, okay. Now I’m going to get my move tool and I’m going to move that lens flare right in the middle of my lamp, something like that.

So now our lens flare filter, it is a smart filter. If there’s an area that you want to remove some of the extra flare, you could select the smart filter mask, B for your brush to change your foreground color to black, and you can just brush anywhere that you want to remove some of the extra flare. And now I’m going back to my light layer and I’m going to reduce the filter down to about 90.

You could see that it’s changing. Now we want to start adding some color to the lamp with the light layer selected. I’m going to come down here to the bottom of the Layers panel and select hue and saturation, going to click on the colorize, increase the saturation to something like that in the hue you can play with that.

I think I like it about there. Now on top of the hue saturation layer, I’m going to add a solid color adjustment and you can choose any color or light, I’m going to choose ff5a00 and say, okay. I’m going to set the blending mode to a Linear Dodge Add. And on my colorful layer and a double click bring up my layer styles, come down here to blend if underline layer and move the shadow slider till I see my shadows coming through there.

Alter option to split the control and then adjusted to the way you like it. You see the light is coming through the shadow area there and say, okay, there’s two before and there’s the actor. So that’s how it looks so far. So now we want to kind of cut down around the edges of some of the color fill layer that we just added.

So we’re going to select the mask of the color fill layer, make sure we’re painting with black with a soft brown brush and just paint right around the edges. So in the lower my flow a little bit and just paint just around the edges. And if there’s any highlights around the lamp itself, bring those in a little bit. Zoom in a little bit here.

Make my brush smaller on the color lookup mask. Select that in paint with black. There might be some highlights up here around the edges, maybe some more here on the side. You can decide on your particular image where this is in. Now, at the very top, you could add color balance adjustment layer and you can adjust mid tones one way or the other and little bit more reds in there.

You can play with these controls here to see what you like. And here is the before and here is the after.

How to Create a Glowing Object

In this example, we’re going to make this round ball glow. I’m going to select that ball and I’m going to use my object selection tool. Once I click on that and my object finder is checked. So now I put my cursor over the areas.

There’s a subject that selected or here is just the round ball that’s selected. Once I click on that, you see the marching ants. Now I want to put that on its own layer. I’m going to say Command J, I’m just going to call this ball. I want to convert the ball layer into a smart object, and now I want to put my ball layer in its own group.

So I’ll say, command +G. I want to keep track of all my layers in this group and call this the ball group. And this first layer right here I’m going to duplicate it and with the rest of the layers that I’m going to duplicate in this group. I’m going to add Gaussian and Blur. So this top layer, I have a selected I’m going to come up here to filter layer Gaussian and Blur.

I’m going to put a radius of five and say, okay, that is a smart object so we can go back in there any time and change that. But I’m going to remind myself and I’m just going to call this ball five, so I’m going to duplicate this again and click on the right here and double click on my Gaussian blur smart filter.

I’m putting a radius of 150 and it’s making the edges of the ball softer every time I do this. I’m going to label Ball 150. I’m going to duplicate this layer again with command j double click on my Gaussian Blur and this time I’m going to set the radius to 300 and say okay and rename my layer here to ball 300.

So now I have all these Gaussian blur layers that are softening the radius of the ball. So now I’m going to collapse this group and I am going to add a hue and saturation adjustment layer, and I’m going to click on colorize and clip it to the layer below it now so I can increase the saturation and I can change the hue.

Any color here I might think looks good so saturation looks good. I can adjust the lightness a little bit and let’s keep it there. So now we’re going to make the background look a little bit darker, and for that we’ll use an exposure adjustment layer, can decrease the exposure and change the gamma correction, something like that. And now we’re going to start working on the areas where we’re actually going to see the glow coming from the ball.

So I come over here to the exposure layer mask and with the foreground color of black and with my brush tool, I’m going to use a soft round brush, make my brush a little bit bigger. Then will drop my flow list a little bit and in these areas right here lightened up right now. But these are some of the areas where you’re going to see your glow and we can come back to this, of course.

So roughly these areas that are going to glow. Now will add some color to the areas that are glowing. I’m going to duplicate the hue and saturation adjustment layer that’s on top. And I’m going to bring that layer down above the exposure adjustment layer. I’m going to invert the layer mask on the hue and saturation adjustment layer with command I and with my layer mask selected on my hue and saturation adjustment layer, I’m going to change my foreground color to white and I want to paint over these areas that I had already lightened.

So this is glow coming off of the ball, reflecting off all these different areas. I had to much or brush in areas that I want to. I could just change my foreground color to black and paint, change it back to white and continue in the areas that I think are necessary for the glow. And that can change my opacity.

If think I’ve gone too far. Here is the before and here is the after. For more Photoshop tutorials, click on one of the videos on the screen now. Please like share and subscribe. Remember it’s never too late to learn. Thanks for watching.

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