Photoshop Tutorials: Add A Sparkle Trail To A Photo
Learn Adobe Photoshop with Photoshop Tutorials at Photoshop Essentials.com
Written By Steve Patterson
In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we're going to learn how to add a sparkle trail to a photo, using a custom Photoshop brush we'll be creating. I got the idea for this tutorial after seeing the poster for an upcoming Dustin Hoffman/Natalie Portman movie, "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium", but of course sparkle trails have been Peter Pan and Tinkerbell, and I'm sure even long before that.
Fortunately, Photoshop makes them extremely easy to create thanks to the powerful brush controls that were introduced in Photoshop 7, which are still just as powerful and useful today!
Here's the image I'll be starting with in this Adobe Photoshop Tutorials:
I'm going to make her magic wand look a little more magical by adding a sparkle trail. Here's how it will look when we're done:
Let's get started.
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Step 1: Open A New Photoshop Document
As I mentioned, we'll be creating our sparkle trail using a custom made Photoshop "sparkle" brush, and the first thing we need to do is create our brush. To begin, go up to the File menu at the top of the screen and choose New, which brings up Photoshop's New Document dialog box. You can also access the New Document dialog box using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+N (Win) / Command+N. Enter 200 pixels for the Width and 200 pixels for the Height, and make sure the Background Contents option near the bottom is set to White so our new document has a white background, then click OK:
Photoshop opens a new 200x200 document with a solid white background:
Step 2: Select The Brush Tool
With our new document created, select the Brush Tool from the Tools palette, or simply press the letter B on your keyboard to access it with the shortcut:
Step 3: Set Your Foreground Color To Black
We need black as our Foreground color, which is the color Photoshop uses to paint with when we have the Brush Tool selected, so if black is not currently your Foreground color, press the letter D on your keyboard to quickly reset your Foreground and Background colors, which sets black as your Foreground color (white becomes your Background color). We can see our current Foreground and Background colors in the color swatches near the bottom of the Tools palette (the swatch in the upper left is the Foreground color and the one in the bottom right is the Background color):
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