Here’s the cursor glitter trail (the color is 100% customizable!!) get a music player for your blog here’s a cute theme-maker blog with themes, customizable pages (with tutorials) and various other cute things you can use! Then, learn how to use the brush to add a magical sparkle trail to a photo! Here we can see my brush cursor, with all of its little sparkles, positioned mostly to.
Learn how to create a custom sparkle brush in Photoshop. Then, learn how to use the brush to add a magical sparkle trail to a photo! Written by Steve Patterson. Photoshop makes creating sparkle brushes and sparkle trails extremely easy.
In the first part of this tutorial, we'll create our sparkle brush from scratch using a few of Photoshop's built-in brushes to add a variety of sparkles to our design. Then, once we've created the sparkle brush, we'll turn it into a sparkle trail using Photoshop's powerful dynamic brush options to control the behavior of the brush as we paint. Finally, we'll add a blurring effect to the sparkle trail and give it a colorful glow to help it look more magical. There's quite a few steps involved but they're all very simple, and as always, I'll be explaining each step as we go so everyone can follow along.
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This version of the tutorial has been updated and expanded for and is fully compatible with Photoshop CS6. If you're using CS5 or earlier, you'll want to follow along with the of this tutorial. Here's the photo I'll be using for this tutorial. I downloaded this one from.
Going to File New. This opens the New Document dialog box. In Photoshop CC 2017, Adobe completely redesigned the New Document dialog box, so which version of it you see depends on which version of Photoshop you're using. If you're using Photoshop CC as I am here (and your copy of CC is ), you'll see the. If you're using Photoshop CS6, you'll see the older, traditional version. We'll look at the redesigned version first. Then, to keep this tutorial compatible with CS6 as well, we'll look at the traditional version.
Don't worry, this only takes a minute. First, in Photoshop CC, the redesigned New Document dialog box will appear on your screen.
Most of the dialog box is taken up by a large area showing thumbnails of both your recently-opened documents and your recently-used document sizes. You can ignore this area. What we want is the Preset Details panel along the right. This is where we enter our own custom document settings. We'll want to create a square document for our brush, so set both your Width and Height values to 200 and change the measurement type to Pixels. Ignore the Resolution value since it and has no effect on what we see on the screen. The only other option we need to worry about here is to make sure that Background Contents is set to White.
When you're done, click the Create button in the bottom right corner to close out of the dialog box and create your document. Selecting the Brush Tool. Step 3: Set Your Foreground Color To Black Next, we need to set our brush color to black. Photoshop uses our current Foreground color as the brush color, so the quickest way to set your Foreground color to black is by pressing the letter D on your keyboard. This resets your Foreground and Background colors to their defaults, making your Foreground color black (and your Background color white).
We can see our current Foreground and Background colors in the two color swatches near the bottom of the Toolbar. The Foreground color (upper left swatch) should now be showing black. Press D (for 'Defaults') to set your Foreground color to black. Step 4: Select the 'Star 70 Pixels' Brush The 'sparkle' brush we're creating is really just a mix of several brushes that ship with Photoshop, and you can experiment with different brush combinations to create your own unique sparkle brush since there's quite a few that would work well for this effect. Or, you can just use the one we'll be creating here. To choose our first brush, with the Brush Tool active, click the Brush panel toggle icon in the Options Bar along the top of the screen.
Choosing 'Airbrush Soft Round 17'. Step 8: Click In A Few Random Spots With The New Brush Just as we did with the previous brush a moment ago, click in three or four random spots to add more sparkles. Since this is an airbrush, the longer you hold down your mouse button after you click, the more the brush shape will 'fill in' towards it edges.
So for even more variety, vary the amount of time you hold your mouse button after you click. If you don't like where you clicked, press Ctrl+Z (Win) / Command+Z (Mac) on your keyboard to undo your last click, then try again. Choosing 'Clear Brush Controls' from the menu. Step 20: Select The 'Shape Dynamics' Category The brush controls are divided into categories, and you'll find the categories listed along the left of the Brush panel. First, let's open up the Shape Dynamics category by selecting it at the top of the list. As we select different categories, make sure you click directly on the category name itself, not inside the checkbox, otherwise you'll turn the category on but you won't have access to any of its options.
Clicking directly on the 'Shape Dynamics' category. Step 21: Set The 'Control' And 'Angle' Options With Shape Dynamics selected, you'll see a Size Jitter slider at the top of the options, and directly below that, you'll see a Control option. It's not entirely obvious, but this Control option is technically the 'Size Control' option. It allows us to choose what, if anything, will control the size of the brush as we paint.
Change the Control option to Fade. You can leave the value set to its default of 25 for now, but remember where to find it because you may want to come back and change it later. Changing 'Control' to 'Fade' and leaving the value set to 25. By setting the Size Control option to 'Fade', Photoshop will gradually lower our brush size down to zero as we paint a brush stroke, and it will do so using the number of 'steps' we've specified, which in this case is 25. You might need to experiment with the number of steps to get your sparkle trail to fade out properly with your image (which is why I mentioned that you should remember where to find this value), but 25 is a good place to start. Also in the Shape Dynamic section, increase the Angle Jitter to 100%.
This will let Photoshop rotate the angle of the brush as we paint, helping our sparkles to look more random and less like a repeating pattern. Clicking 'Brush Tip Shape'. Step 27: Increase 'Spacing' To 50% Down at the bottom of the options, increase the Spacing value to 50%. Spacing determines the maximum length of our brush stroke (our sparkle trail). As with the Fade value we looked at earlier in th Shape Dynamics category, you may need to experiment a little bit with Spacing to get the length of the sparkle trail just right.
At the very bottom of the Brush panel, below the Spacing slider, you'll see a preview of what the sparkle trail will look like with all of our brush options applied. Increasing 'Spacing' to 50%.
Adding A Motion Trail Step 28: Paint Your Sparkle Trail We've created our sparkle brush, and we've set all of our brush control options in the Brush panel. We've also added a new blank layer to hold our sparkle trail, and we've set our Foreground color to white. Now for the fun part. We finally get to paint our sparkle trail! Position your brush cursor on, or just to the right or left, of the source of the sparkle trail. In my case, the source is the girl's magic wand so I'll position my cursor just to the left of it. You'll want to match the size of your brush cursor with the size of the object, which means you'll most likely need to resize your brush.
The easiest way to do that if from the keyboard. Press the left bracket key ( ) repeatedly to make the brush smaller or the right bracket key ( ) to make it larger. Here we can see my brush cursor, with all of its little sparkles, positioned mostly to the left of the wand but also overlapping it a little bit. Position your brush cursor where you want the sparkle trail to begin. To paint the sparkle trail, press and hold your mouse button, then simply drag in the direction that you want the sparkle trail to flow.
In my case, I'll drag over the girl's head and down the other side of her, as if she created the sparkle trail by waving her wand through the air. Notice how Photoshop fades the size of the brush (and the sparkle trail) as you drag further from the source point, until eventually the brush fades away completely. That's the result of the Fade option we set in the Shape Dynamics section of the Brush panel. Pressing and holding my mouse button, then dragging over the girl to the other side. Don't worry about getting the sparkle trail exactly right the first time. If you're not happy with it, simply press Ctrl+Z (Win) / Command+Z (Mac) on your keyboard to undo it and then try again.
If the trail is fading out too quickly (or not quickly enough), again press Ctrl+Z (Win) / Command+Z (Mac) on your keyboard to undo it. Then, go back to the Brush panel and try a different Fade value in the Shape Dynamics category (Step 21). You can also try adjusting the Spacing value to change the maximum length of the trail (Step 27). There's no rush, so feel free to experiment until you're happy with the result. Step 29: Paint Additional Trails To Add More Sparkles (Optional) If you find that there isn't enough 'sparkle' in the trail, simply paint a second trail over top of the first one to bulk it up.
In my case, I'm first going to reduce the size of my brush by pressing the left bracket key ( ) on my keyboard. Then, I'll again position my brush cursor just to the left of the wand and I'll paint a second, slightly smaller sparkle trail through the middle of the first one.
Going to Filter Blur Gaussian Blur. This opens the Gaussian Blur dialog box where you'll find the Radius slider along the bottom. The Radius value controls the amount of blurring that's applied.
Keep an eye on your image as you drag the slider towards the right. The further you drag, the more blurring you'll apply, creating a soft glow around the sparkles. The exact value you need will depend on the size of your image.
For a larger image like the one I'm using, a Radius value of between 15 to 20 pixels works well. For smaller images, you'll want to use a smaller value.