Okay. Now this one pretty much uses techniques from my earlier two tutorials, but I thought I’d share it anyway. You never know who will need it. It’s to create a spotlight on any object. Could be a software box, application icon, or a baboon’s rear end.
Step 1: Create a fairly large document, which should be at least 5 times the size of the graphic. Make a black background.
Step 2: Import your graphic. Make sure it’s edges are masked. So if it’s a JPEG, you will have to use some masking techniques to get rid of the boxyness. So now you should have your black background layer, and the masked object on top of it. Create another layer under the object. Name it “spotlight”.
Step 3: Use the elliptical marquee tool to create a flat ellipse. The object should come right in the middle of the marquee. Now give it a feather (Select > Modify > Feather). Around 20 px should do fine, but don’t worry, you can blur it with a Gaussian blur later on. Reduce opacity considerably.
Step 4: Now create a random shape, large enough, on a new layer using the lasso tool. It doesn’t have to be anything perfect. You could even use the elliptical marquee tool. Give it a feather. Then fill the shape with white (Press D on the keyboard, and hit Command+Backspace).
Step 5: Now with the shape still selected, run the difference clouds filter on it (Filter > Render > Difference Clouds). Then deselect it (Command+D).
Step 6: Go to Filter > Blur > Motion blur. Make the blur angle to 90* and amount to around 800.
Step 7: Hit Command+T to bring up the free transform mode. Now Command drag the top left/right handles inward to make the point of origin for the light source to the center.
Step 8: After accepting the transformation, add a “reveal all” mask to it (Layer > Layer Masks > Reveal all). Press D to make the colours default (black to white). Now select your gradient tool. Making sure the mask is selected in the layers palette, and the gradient is Foreground to background, drag a straight line from top of the light source to the bottom of it. This will make the light source prominent while fading it while going down. If it isn’t right, go ahead and do an “Undo” and try again, cause it takes a few times to get it right. Reduce opacity.
Step 9: Now, create a mask for the bottom “spotlight” layer as well. This time, make it a radial gradient (select the radial gradient button from the gradient toolbar). Drag out to create a nice soft effect.
Step 10: Do a light shadow for the object as well if it needs one. Use the marquee tools and the mask+gradient thing to get some nice effects. Reduce opacity. Also use the Gaussian blur filter to reduce the sharpness.
Step 11: You can also experiment with the colour of the light and the spotlight. Just make sure they both have the same colour (Command+U for Hue/Saturation and then hit Colourize. If you don’t get any colour, reduce or increase “lightness”).
Step 12: If you have colourised the light source, then it would look nice if the object itself had some tint in it. Duplicate the object layer, then do the same hue/Saturation to it, and add a top to bottom gradient mask.
There’s a lot of types of spotlights you can add. This one's a very basic one. Just deviate from those steps above to create some nice spotlights of your own.
Hit me with it. I promise I can take it.
Photoshop: Spotlight on object
Linear Mode
