Design an Shining Girl Poster with Awesome Lighting Effect in Photoshop

Posted on November 3rd, 2009 under Photo Effect, it has 26 Comments and 33,637 Views so far.

In this tutorial, I will show you the steps I took to create this really cool, shining girl poster by using the powerful photoshop brush engine, plus previously mentioned cloud warpping and some basic photo retouch techniques. Have a try!

Along the way, we will go through some photo retouch techniques, make a brush then tweak with the Photoshop brush engine, also we will use the cloud filter to create some awesome lighting effect.

This is an intermediate level tutorial so some steps can be a bit tricky, if you get stuck, just drop a comment below and I will try my best to help you out.

Here is a preview of the final effect for this tutorial: (click to enlarge)

Alternative Version:

PSD File for this Tutorial

You can have this PSD File for only $2.00 via Paypal! Click the link below and you will be taken to the Paypal checkout page, after payment you will be redirect to the download page automatically.

Ok let’s get started!

To complete this tutorial, you will need the following stock:

Rainbow Girl

Step 1

Create a new document sized 800px * 1200px and fill the background layer with Black colour. Load the Rainbow Girl image into Photoshop and cut the girl out by using whatever selection method you like to use. (I used Channel Mask technique here, if you’re interested, here is a tutorial for it)

Copy and paste the girl image onto our document, as shown below:

1 paste

Name this layer as “girl”.

Step 2

Now we’re into the interesting part of retouching. As you may have noticed, we have some facial impection here as shown below:

facial impection

To clean them up, simply grab the Spot Healing Brush Tool and the Healing Brush Tool, apply the following settings:

Spot Healing Brush Tool

spot healing

Healing Brush Tool

healing brush

With the Spot Healing Brush Tool, simply do a single click on the black spot you like to get rid of. If you found it’s not quite working, you the healing brush tool to sample a good piece of skin, then heal the black spot with it.

Here is my effect after the clean up:

after cleanup

Step 3

Now we can smooth her skin a bit. To do this, simply duplicate the girl layer, go to Filter > Blur > Surface Blur and apply the following settings:

3 surface blur

Because we only want her face and the should skin to be blurred, so we can hide the rest of the layer by adding a layer mask to it, as shown below:

3 mask

Reduce the layer opacity of this duplicated layer to around 50%.

And here is the effect so far, you can see now we have a much better girl image:

3 effect

Step 4

Let’s add some lighting effect on the image. Create a new layer called light on top of the “girl copy” layer and grab a soft white brush, paint over the area as shown below:

4 paint

Set the blendng mode of this light layer to “Overlay”, drop the opacity to around 50%. Add the following two adjustment layers on top of the light layer:

Curves

4 curves

Brightness and Contrast

4 bc

And here is the effect so far:

4 effect

Step 5

Now let’s make a simple custom brush, which we will then use to create the background of this image.

Create a new document (size doesn’t matter here) and fill the background with Black. Grab the Rectangular Tool as shown below:

5 rect tool

Create a new layer on top of the background layer, draw a rectangular shape on the canvas, then right-click it and choose “Stroke Path”, choose the option “Pencil” (Make sure you set the pencil size to be 1px, with a light grey colour)

5 stroke

And here is the effect after you stroke the path:

5 draw

Now we want to get rid of the part outside the square. To do so, go to Image > Trim and apply the following settings:

5 trim

You will see the black part outside the square is now gone. Now hide the background layer, go to Edit > Define Brush Preset and save the brushset as “square”:

5 define

5 name brush

And you will see the brush appears in the brush panel:

5 brush loc

Step 6

Let apply this brushset to our image. Create a new layer named “square brush texture” under the original girl layer, click on the brush we just made, apply the following brush dynamic to it:

Shape Dynamics

6 shape dyn

Scattering

6 scattering

Tick “Smoothing” option.

And paint away with this brushset on the texture layer around the girl edge, adjust the brush size for variations:

6 paint

Optionally, you can cancel the dynamics and just use the original brush, for different effect:

6 paint 2

Step 7

Now we can add some cloud on top of the shapes texture layer. Create a new layer on top of the square shape texture layer called “cloud”, use the Lasso Tool with a 20px feather, draw a selection and render some cloud inside it, change the blending mode of this layer to “Colour Dodge”:

7 cloud

Duplicate the cloud layer once and drag it onto the feet position, so to create some highlight on her feet: (Resize it a bit with the free transform tool)

7 cloud 2

Now duplicate the cloud layer a few more times and change the blending mode of those layers to “Normal”. On each duplcated layer, hit Ctrl + T and right-click to choose the “Warp” option, warp the cloud to different shapes around the girl’s body:

7 warp cloud

This step is entirely up to you want kind of the shapes you like, here is my effect:

7 warp cloud 2

And here is the effect so far:

7 effect

Step 8

Ok we’re almost there! Now let’s do some final adjustment for the image. On top of all previous layers, add a Black and White adjustment layer on the top:

8 bw

Change the blending mode of this black and white layer to “Overlay”, apply the following layer mask to it:

8 bw mask 1

You can see by adding the mask, we created some depth to the image:

8 effect 1

Duplicate this black and white layer twice, maintain the blending mode as “Overlay”. Add aonther Vibrance adjustment layer on top of the duplicated layer:

8 vib

Create a new layer on top of every other layer and set the blending mode of it to “color”, grab a big soft brush with colour of your choice and simply paint on desired area. You will have the following effect:

8 effect

Step 9

OK we can do some fine-tuning of the final image by adding some light strips. To do this, simply flatten the image, duplicate the background layer once, and apply the following motion blur setting to the duplicated layer:

9 motion blur

Change the blending mode of this motion blur layer to “Screen”. Here we don’t really want to the whole image to be covered by blur, so we add a layer mask to the motion blur layer to hide a portion of it:

9 mask