How to achieve this effect?!

talk design
1

I am wondering for a while now how to make those ‘beams’ of light like this. First of all how the shape is made and second how it is made to look like it’s this beam of light… Can think of somethings to do, but I never get it to look like this…

Bart-c

2

Looks like a lot photoshopping to me…

3

yeah, and much use of the burn tool.

4

it actually isn’t that hard… it requires a bit of layering and therefore detail but with a bit of perseverance you’ll get there.

have a look carefully at the image (its hard for us because it’s small) and see the different elements - you can see lots of little lines that make up the main shape (and notice that they’re a bit wispy, not all plain thickness), theres also sort of speckles - you could do this with a brush or even get a texture image and place it there and mask bits out.

then the main part of this kind of effect: you need to get bigger patches or streaks of white and use blending modes… things like overlay are good for enhancing the color, while others like dodge can bring the intensity up. play around, duplicating and trying different shapes to get a variety of effects.

when you see little parts/strands that diverge from the main flow, that could either be done by drawing them individually, or, if you draw them on the same layer as the rest of the lines, you could modify the blending modes of layers so they’re not as obvious.