Tutorials » •
Essentially blurred light gives the illusion that something is in motion and that the motion is on such a large scale that it's distorting or blurring the appearance of the object. We'll need to use something that has a wide variety of colors to produce a better effect. I chose this picture of Salma Hayek being as it has lots of blues, oranges, and whites, this will create a nice effect. I used a picture of my face, which I scanned in, I then gave it a different hue with the Hue/Saturation option, this produced a nice array of blues, grays, and whites. You can use the image I used (left) by right-clicking on it and choosing Save Picture As, or you can choose your own, make sure you choose an image with a large variety of colors. - Click +
Hold the photo's layer and drag it onto the Create New Layer button at the bottom-right of the Layers palette. You've just created a copy of the original layer.
Select the copied layer, choose Filter>Blur>Motion Blur from the main menu. Make sure that Preview is checked and use a setting that produces an effect close to the example to the left.You don't want to blur it too much, you want to be able to see where the blurring ends at the sides, make sure it doesn't go off-screen. - Create a new layer above all the others. Set the background color to white and the foreground color to a any light blue, or depending on the effect you want to produce choose other light toned colors.
Now choose Filter>Render>Cloudsfrom the main menu. Set the blending mode to Color Dodge, this might make the image turn completely white, this means you need need to lower the opacity of the layer to make the layers below it visible.Here's the effect I achieved (left). Although some people might be thinking its no big deal, others use it widely in their wallpapers and interfaces. Some of the best wallpapers I've seen had an effect similar to this one.Once you have your your light's motion you can use it to add even better effect to photo like the example below.
Congrats, you're done After the Text Loop tutorial was released I received a couple requests to make a tutorial on how I created the light in the interface I used as an example. Well, here it is, it's a bit modified from the original but you'll end upwith a similar effect.
