How to Create Light Painting Effect in Photoshop

In this tutorial you’ll learn how to create a neon like tron effect. This kind of effects create majestic wow effect into any average image. This is equally helpful for graphic designers and web designers.
Graphic Designers will use this effect in Photo Manipulations, Digital Paintings, Commercial Industrial designing and actually it can fit anywhere. Web Designers can use it to add shine in a web design.

Since this is my last tutorial before Christmas, I wanted to make something with lights 🙂
Next week I’ll make a roundup of the best tutorials on the web in December 2011.

Mouse Image

Final Result

This is what we are making!

The Gong Hits

We start off with this image. I removed the background as you can see. We do this all the time 😛

Select the Pen Tool and make a curve according to the bends of the mouse.

Make a new layer, then select brush tool and adjust the brush settings according to the image below. Go to the Path section of the Layer panel. Right click on the work path and then select the Stroke Path. Remember adjust the brush settings and the color first.

Here is the Curve!

Here I’m going to apply the outer glow to the curve with these setting and the same color of the curve.

Here I’m going to apply the color overlay to the curve with the same color.

Result

Boring Stuff

Now comes the boring part, this is the time to draw all the curves. I selected Pen Tool on which I’ll apply the same layer styles which I did earlier on the first curve.
Remember! each of these curves is on a separate layer in the paths section.

I’m going to apply the same blue color layer style on these curves of the mouse.

The Difference

Here I’m going to apply a different color on the curves, but how..?
You need the same styles which I used before, but for these curves you should just replace the color overlay color and the outer glow color with this yellow code: #ffbe00

Background

Making a file for the background.

Go to Filter>Render>Clouds

Go to Filter>Pixelate>Mosaic and then set the amount of squares to 23, hit OK.

Go to Filter>Noise>Median then set the radius to 3, OK.

Go to Filter>Stylize>Glowing Edges adjust the settings then OK.

Result

Here I transformed the background according to the height and width of our object, mouse.

Select the Eraser tool and the then adjust the Eraser Brush and the erase background edges. I’m keeping it simple, otherwise we could also make a mask to remove the unnecessary parts.

Now take a new layer select soft brush and make random brush strokes of the matching colors on the background, then change the blend mode to overlay.

Select the Type tool and type designzzz (don’t you dare write anything else!) in the same blue color and apply the same layer styles which we used for the curves.

Text Effect

Duplicate the Text Layers, rasterize the new one and then Go to filter>Blur>Motion Blur adjust the angle and distance then OK. Put this layer under the Designzzz Text layer.

Here I type the Legacy. You can give it the same layer styling which I applied before but I have left it without styling so that you can get both results.