Inspired by: GROSS.MAX Volume 3

The last installation is upon us and ladies and gentleman, grab your sunglasses or any light shielding apparatus, we are going NEON.

Inspired by images like this one from GROSS MAX, I have adapted and altered a wonderful tutorial from Abduzeedo on how to make neon lights in photoshop. Shall we begin?

Step 1_Background

Use any night scene, jpeg, tiff, or psd that you would like to illuminate that you have prepared or take this one.

Now create a new layer on top of this one, and go to FILTER_RENDER_CLOUDS.

This is a certain style that results from background effect. Later I create a blue light without the cloud filter, so it is not an absolute. If you use it though it should not cover the whole area. Cut out the general shape of your light source. To do this turn off the cloud layer and trace the light shape directly from your rendering or photograph.

Then turn back on the cloud layer with the shape still selected. While the cloud layer is active, select the inverse of your shape and delete the selection.

Change the cloud layer’s blending mode to COLOR DODGE.

Step 2_Create Light Source

On a new layer retrace the shape of the light source. And fill it with the general color of the light. Duplicate this layer and hide the duplicate.

Apply a FILTER_BLUR_GAUSSIAN BLUR to this layer, I applied a 20 pixel radius but this is dependent upon the effect you desire.

Step 3_Create Glow

Now we are going to apply a collection of layer styles to articulate the light.

Go to LAYER_LAYER STYLES_BLENDING OPTIONS. In the first window, turn the fill opacity down. You will reapply the color at the end.

We are going to apply  DROP SHADOW first

The BLEND MODE should be MULTIPLY; the color of the shadow will have a significant effect on the output. If you want to define an object such as a light fixture I would recommend a black or dark shadow, if you want something that looks like its glowing use a color similar to the color of the light source. For this tut I actually used a pinkish hue to compliment the red.

Next apply INNER GLOW, I found that the blending modes, LIGHTEN and COLOR BURN result in clean, bright outputs.

The next layer is the OUTER GLOW , the blending mode here should be SCREEN and this is where you can really manipulate the intensity of the light’s edge by exploring different color combination.

Also the technique here can be changed from SOFTER to PRECISE in order to create fuzzy effects or clearly defined stripes of light.

Now apply the OUTER BEVEL, this is more flexible to experiment with, or you can look at the following screen shots as guides.

The final layer style is COLOR OVERLAY now overlay the color of the light source. If you manipulate the blending mode here it will drastically abstract the realness of the light, therefore I kept it at normal.

Step 4_Refine Effect

To strengthen the effect copy the layer and all of its associated layer styles and put it in front with less of an opacity.

Once again, changing the blending mode on the top layer can result in different environments. I found that HARD LIGHT gave off more of a glow than say OVERLAY, it just depends on if you want a more streamlined or casting effect.

That is the basic technique but with all visual representation, experimenting is the way to truly understand the medium.

Step 4_Experiment

This last image shows three different combinations of layer styles. The blue lightning has NO CLOUD FILTER and has a light blue color applied to the DROP SHADOW effect, and I didn’t reduce the opacity at all in the first window, thereby I did not apply a COLOR OVERLAY at the end. The green object has black DROP SHADOW and INNER GLOW and has a COLOR OVERLAY. You can see the varying degree of edge precision. This is a wonderful and easy effect to illustrate nighttime scenes and add momentous attitude to your renderings.

Brave new world?