Photoshop Zone

One of the things I’ve seen around quite a bit lately is a transparent rainbow gradient effect on a dark background. It seems to me that flashy transparent gradients are in these days. They make me think about magic. Today I’ll show you how you can create a magical rainbow color flame. OK, maybe I’m using too many words in a row here, but it’s the best I can do to describe this. I should tell you upfront that for this tutorial basic knowledge of Photoshop is needed. Draw smoky lines First we start with the creation of the smoky lines by using the Pen tool . Use a white fill for each shape layer and an Opacity of 40% . Set the Layer mode of the layer to Overlay and the Fill to 0% . Double click on the right on one of the layers to open the Layer Styles . Add a white Drop Shadow of 100% Opacity and set the Blend Mode to Overlay . Distance and Spread is set to 0 and Size to 11 . Next, make sure to uncheck Layer Knocks Out Shadow . Now ch...

Final Image Preview Before we get started, let’s take a look at the image we’ll be creating. Before and after images are shown below. Click the screenshot to view a large color version. As always, the full Photoshop file is available via . Step 1 Double-click on the background image to make it an active layer. Create a new group by clicking on the little folder icon located at the bottom of the layers palette and put the layer in the group. Name the group “girl”. Draw a path around all the hard edges of the girl. This includes the face and the shoulders. Don’t worry about the hair for now; we will do that separately. Save the path. Make a selection of the path by holding Command-clicking on the path thumbnail in the paths palette. Hit Alt+Command+D and Feather the selection by 0.5px. Apply the selection as a mask on the “girl” group. Step 2 Disable the mask on the “girl” group by holding Shift-clicking on the mask thumbnail. Now in the Channels palette, dupli...