Now we’re going to add a little special effect: a flare around Jonny’s flashlight, to make it look brighter than the rest of the scene. It’s really quite easy. We’re going to do this one in layers, so it’ll be easy to fix if something goes wrong. Having done this earlier tonight, I happen to know that nothing will go wrong this time, but you never know.
First off, we need to create a new layer. This is extremely easy. Just go to the little arrow at the top left of your Layers palette (which is most likely hiding behind your Channels palette. If you can’t find it, just go to the Window/Layers menu and it’ll pop up.)
Even though I’ve got the wrong item
selected in our example here, you can see the new layer option second from the top. You can also just click on the icon at the bottom of the palette that looks like a piece of paper with the corner folded up, second from the right. Now, we’ll have a new layer set up here, which we can do whatever we want with without affecting our artwork layer. I selected a 25% yellow, and, using the brush tool (it’s behind the pencil tool on the Tools palette.) set to 25% opacity, 25% flow, multiply mode, and Airbrush mode, I just drew the flashlight flare on the new layer. When the artwork layer is made invisible, the flare looks like this:
Gosh, this page is getting a little cluttered with images. Anyway, we can just flatten the image at this point and we end up with this:
Now we’ll drop the logos on, which sounds a lot more exiting than it is. I’ve got the logos saved as vector files elsewhere, so I just convert them to the properly sized bitmaps and drag them in.
Next we’re going to get to the part you’re really interested in, and it’s going to be a lot easier than you expect.
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