Photoshop Tutorial: Adding Sparkles to Artwork/Wallpaper

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Prescript Note:

This entry contains few large images and lengthy explanation. Readers with slow connections may get lagged while loading this blog’s main page, so I put a separator here to prevent it from happening. ^^;;

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Please click on the following to continue reading.

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In doing artwork/wallpaper, there’s a technique of utilizing “sparkling” impression of ornaments (or brushworks), in order to enhance the picture’s atmosphere. When applying this style, the elements added in the image are given ’shiny’ and transparent impression, leaving the idea as if there is a unique lighting effect on the image — rather than a mere ornament or brushwork laid on place.

This kind of styling is often referred as “sparkling”, due to its nature of using “shining” object. Bluntly speaking, this is the style where you can adorn your artworks with glittering ornaments and such. ^^’

An example of this can be seen as following:

^{Arsenal FC’s crest retouched with sparkling effects.
The image was cropped from one of my works located here.}

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As in my opinion, this style can be said as “eyecandy” — you can add glitters and glows to enhance your work. However, there’s a huge weakness of this: once you apply it too much, the quality shall be grounded.

Huh, grounded? why? (o_0)”\

An explanation for this can be summed as following. When glitters are applied, they act like an “additional sugar”. However, too much of it leaves the image too ’sweety’ — when there is too much glow, the image shall become too contrasty and eyesore. At worst, this also rules the lighting composition out in the particular image.

Perhaps an analogous example is like a Christmas Tree. When there are no ornaments on it, the tree looks just plain — it’s only a usual tree with branches and green leaves. Though, things start to change when people put lamps, bells, and other ornaments on it. The tree will become more lively, thus radiating cheerful aura.

However, too many lamps isn’t very good either — many people will have eyestrain for looking at them (because the light is too intense), rendering the excessive lamp to be inefficent.

So, with that said, there’s a restriction in doing sparkles: a good amount of it may do well; however excessive usage of it will leave the images too ’sweety’. There’s also a ‘bonus’ of having too much sparkles — the image’s lighting composition will get coarsed, since the ornaments’ glows shall interfere with it.

So, how do we create sparkles?

Now, let’s go to the concepts. Below, I’ll show again the image we have seen before, respectively.

What’s the eyecandy there?

First off, there are glows. This is what to give a ’shining effects’ on the snowflakes and the lines there.

For the second, look at the ornament. We can see that even though there is snowflakes in front of the word “Arsenal”, the “a” letter’s shape is still much legible. At this point, playing on the opacity takes role. Sparkles look much better when they’re a little transparent, rather than when they are at 100% opacity.

And the most important is the third one: use a PROPERLY-CHOSEN background. If you’d like to use sparkles, a dark background is most likely a no-no — the colors will probably collided in severe crash.

(umm, you can try imagining the BG in the pic above as black or dark blue to begin with )

At this point, using soft colors enhanced with fog effect or gradients is a good choice to take. Also consider the color difference between BG and its sparkle; too-diferent color pairings (e.g. red BG with yellow or green sparkles) are bad choices to have, and will ruin the mood of the image.

Let’s Go!

Alright, I might have been talking too much about concepts. So, here we go with the tutorial.

Comes the article…

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Note:

All the steps here have been tested using Adobe Photoshop 7.0, and can directly be adopted to its higher version (e.g. CS or CS2).

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In this tutorial, I’ll cover about two kinds of sparkles I used in one of my past works, Bouquet from An Angel (dated July 29, 2006). There, I used sparkles on lane-shaped brushworks and circle-shaped ornaments.

After the explanation of making these sparkles concludes, there will be an example-session, concerning their usage in that work.

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1. Circle-shaped Sparkle

We’ll begin with the circle-shaped sparkle. First off, I created a white circle on a previously-worked background. Create a new layer, and select a circle using round-shaped marquee. The rest is to use a paint bucket on it.

After that, set that layer’s Fill opacity to 0%.

We’re going to add a ‘halo’ effect on that circle. Right-click in the layer to access the Blending Options menu, after that check the Inner Glow section.

The ‘halo’ effect still needs retouching, so we’ll go for it. Go to the Outer Glow section in the same window. On that section, I entered information as displayed in figure below:

Note that it is important to keep inner glow and outer glow’s opacity close to each other. This is done to prevent the appearance of sharp, unbridged circle-line between the inner and outer glow.

The sparkling result will mostly look like this:

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2. Lane-shaped Sparkle

In this sparkle, I have created a new shape, which consists of few lines following few lanes. As the image below can show, the lanes have some turning points on them.

For this shape, we’ll take a slightly different method to create the sparkle. The first step is still the same: reduce the Fill opacity to 0%

After that, right click on the layer, and go to the Blending Options mode. Check the Outer Glow section, and do the tweaking. Be careful not to take a too-wide outer glow, it can end up engulfing all the shape’s lanes.

As to this point, the image will look like this:

Now, here comes some trick. To obtain some more effect, duplicate that layer. After that, slightly nudge the duplicated layer from its original position.

Our sparkle will now look like this:

And so we have completed the sparkling-creating steps. But, hold on… there’s a hint on how such ornaments be placed up on wallpapers. We’ll talk about it on the next section.

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Utilizing Sparkles – Just a Little Tip

Well, as I mentioned before, here we go. In this section, I’m going to show how I used the sparkles in one of my works.

First off, we have a previously-done material without any sparkles. The background has also been enhanced, so that the colors wouldn’t crash with the going-to-be sparkles.

Then, let’s start the placement. Below, I have created a distribution-spots of sparklings on the image. Note that different color means different layer — and different layer means a probably-different opacity and outer/inner glow’s color.

As we can see, the usage of lane-shaped sparkle are only on the “wings” look-alike. Many other sparkles are circle-shaped, and there is one ribbon-like ornament on-charge (see the purple spot). So, we can directly apply the lane-shaped sparkle in step-by-step #2 to create the “wings”.

With the spots defined, I created the circle-sparkles using method described in step-by-step #1. In different layers, I modified the opacity and glow’s color, to give impression of some ‘bubbles’ being more front and other being placed behind. This is also applied in the ribbon-like sparkle in the purple area.

Well… after all spots have been sparkled, the work’s done. Here’s the outcome of it:

If you’d like to see the full-sized image (@ 1024×768), simply click on the image. You’ll be referred to the bigger picture.

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And so, this concludes our PS tutorial session for this time. Hope you like it.

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