Tutorial: Rays of Light
After releasing my latest wallpaper devkit I received a bunch of requests from people, asking me to do a tutorial on how to create rays of light with Adobe Photoshop. Well here we go…
Draw gradient
In a first step open Photoshop and create a new document. If you intend to create a wallpaper you may already choose the respective dimensions. Fill the background layer with a subtle gradient like on the screenshot below.
Select gradient type
Now create a new layer and select the gradient tool from the tools palette. The context sensitive options palette now displays gradient specific settings. Click the gradient in order to open the gradient editor. Now select Noise as gradient type and click the “Randomize” button to get a balanced gradient (hue is not important). Make sure that it looks similar to the one shown in the screenshot below.
Draw angle gradient
Now we can draw a gradient on our newly created layer. Make sure that you’ve selected Angle Gradient in the options palette and draw a gradient that looks similar to the one below.
Desaturate
Now we just need to desaturate the layer via “Image - Adjustments - Desaturate” and set its blending mode either to Soft Light or Overlay. Voila - we are finished. Quite easy huh? :)
49 comments so far
Skip to comment form
David Worni May 23, 2007 at 03:42 PM
Hey cool, thanx. I don’t know about the gradient type… nice to know.
Greets
Dave
mårten May 23, 2007 at 03:42 PM
Thanks! Keep up the awesome job!
Ian May 23, 2007 at 04:15 PM
Dude, you read my mind. I was just looking at the wallpaper admiring the light rays, and this article dropped into NewsFire. Awesome, thanks.
Ian
Jeannette May 23, 2007 at 04:36 PM
Thanks … didn’t realize it could be that easy.
Matt Wilson May 23, 2007 at 04:48 PM
Fantastic! Thanks for the tutorial. Looking forward to more!
Vlad Gerasimov May 23, 2007 at 04:55 PM
Hey! It must be hot time for rays of light, I just wrote my own tutorial about that too! Thoughts crossing :-)
shery2102 May 23, 2007 at 04:55 PM
wow, nice and easy
Pierro May 23, 2007 at 05:13 PM
its looking nice and easy – i will try it .
thanks a lot for this !
Pat May 23, 2007 at 07:28 PM
Great tutorial.
BTW, do you mean “Draw Angle Gradient” :)
Wolfgang May 23, 2007 at 08:20 PM
Hehe – yeah exactly. Thanks for the hint.
SasaVtec May 23, 2007 at 08:42 PM
Great job, very simple, but attractive too :).
Amnell May 23, 2007 at 09:56 PM
Really nice and quick tutorial. Thumbs up
J. Houk May 23, 2007 at 10:24 PM
Brilliant. Thanks for the tutorial. It’s almost TOO easy! :)
shadownight May 23, 2007 at 10:41 PM
Very, very cool! Thanks…
Rafael Marin May 23, 2007 at 11:04 PM
Awesome!
Alexander HAhn May 24, 2007 at 01:20 AM
sweet! might come handy!
Jamie Hill May 24, 2007 at 01:32 AM
Thanks for that, had no idea that gradient existed and been using Photoshop for years.
mpare May 24, 2007 at 02:22 AM
Hehe, I was just playing with this the other day. While I like your rays I went a different route to have a more… I don’t know something. Anyways you can view my mockup of a recent site design at http://www.flickr.com/photos/paretech/tags/taniwha/.
Created a bubble then made it into a brush for the rest. Let me know what you think.
-mpare
Hamish M May 24, 2007 at 05:18 AM
Wow, very nice use of that gradient type!
Ewald May 24, 2007 at 10:03 AM
Wow, really easy! Just need know how. And you definitely do. Thanks for sharing.
langley May 24, 2007 at 10:46 AM
That easy, that cool!
Robert May 24, 2007 at 03:40 PM
Qick and clean, thank you :-)
digitalsoft May 24, 2007 at 06:10 PM
couldnt have made it simpler myself :D, nice one.
Wu Han May 25, 2007 at 05:52 AM
I’m suddenly hit with nostalgia—remembering the Ray of Light website of yore. Managed to find a related link too (the old flash site is unfortunately gone). Any of you dotcom veterans remember this? Flash Kit: Ray of Light Tutorial
J. Houk May 25, 2007 at 05:50 PM
Wu- I think that was one of the first Flash tutorials I ever did. Wow… that must have been 5 years ago. Back when Flash was still Macromedia, and Photoshop was still using numbers… Good times..
Jaime May 25, 2007 at 06:32 PM
very clever
BeStMaker May 26, 2007 at 01:29 AM
really nice, thanks 4 sharing
nlecam May 26, 2007 at 08:21 AM
Just tried it, nice ! And as a french speaker I must advice you that “voilà” must be written with the accentued character à ;-)
Genie May 26, 2007 at 09:46 AM
Wow! nice on indeed! Thanks for sharing
Jonathan Solichin May 26, 2007 at 10:10 PM
Nice! Amazingly simple. I think I was more astonished on how easy this was then the actual awesome ray! Thanks so much.
Teddy May 26, 2007 at 11:59 PM
Awesome tutorial. Thanks for sharing. I used the technique in the header image of my blog.
Chito May 27, 2007 at 12:36 PM
This is what im looking for! This is very realistic (i see these interesting light rays when we go snorkel) Thank you very much!
pickupjojo May 27, 2007 at 03:11 PM
Wow, really great and so easy!
(But it’s “voilà”, not “voila”… French word :D)
incognitus May 29, 2007 at 01:42 PM
nlecam & pickupjojo: Although you are definitely right regarding French, New Oxford American Dictionary distributed with Mac OS X confirms that in English you can also use transliterated “voila” without the accent. Theoretically English alphabet contains only 26 characters.
Shopper May 29, 2007 at 04:07 PM
Thank you so much for this – an awesome contribution! It’s like heaven itself is shining down :)
Eric Stoller May 30, 2007 at 02:58 AM
This looks like a good candidate for a PhotoShop action!
Adrian May 30, 2007 at 02:53 PM
Thank you for taking the time to share :)
Ben May 31, 2007 at 06:49 PM
Thankyou bartelme, I dont think that this is such an easy Job to DO,
BooTCaT June 02, 2007 at 11:33 AM
Thanks , Nice tutorial .
evolus June 02, 2007 at 04:37 PM
Thanks a lot, very interesting ;)
Webdesign den haag June 04, 2007 at 12:40 PM
Looks very very nice!
Frank June 07, 2007 at 02:59 PM
You should write more short tutorials for photoshop. Seems beside me a lot of people like tham.
alice June 07, 2007 at 06:04 PM
Very groovey baby, thanks for sharing the wisdom.
Michael June 11, 2007 at 12:34 AM
With your tutorial it`s very easy to learn how to do – thank you
Leandro Silva June 21, 2007 at 07:16 PM
Would you please tell me how to make a link in photoshop.
If you go to my webpage as indivated above, I have only one partial page. I placed a link to a second page by selecting a slive with the slice tool and writting the URL and the target. Although The link work fine when I open the Homepage in IE, the page itself look blank. ( Although if I go to the sector where I put the link with the mouse in will recognize there a link and ig I clicl on it it will open the second page normally. The homepage goes blank as soon as I uploaded with a link in it. Othewise will show up ok.
Please I am desperate to have an answer.Thank you very mucj for your help.
Gay June 28, 2007 at 09:23 AM
Cool Tutorial it was usefull for me, thanks
Kai June 29, 2007 at 10:42 AM
Thank you for the great tutorial.
Da Stefan von typneun July 18, 2007 at 11:14 AM
Thanks! Nice job!
Neil Maranan July 19, 2007 at 07:38 PM
Thank you for that great tutorial. That was fast and very easy to understand. Hoping to have more tutorials from you.