Photoshop Tutorial: Glowing Affect Photoshop: Colorful Light Beam

This tutorial is not very hard at all and you should be able to make something like my beam if you follow the steps I took. Please remember that as you get better with photoshop its more and more up to you to decide what looks better or worse. The steps are not set in concrete! You may get a better beam by doing something I didnt.

Step: 0
Open a new document. Make it big enough. I used 2000x1500. Fill the background with black.

Step: 1
We are now going to make the main body of our beam. Make a new layer and Select a rectangle about 20px wide and 1000px tall.

Step: 2

Fill the rectangle with white on the new layer. Duplicate the layer and use Gaussian blur on it to give the original rectangle a little bit of a glow. Merge the layers.

Step: 3

Using the smudge tool with a "chalk" brush and a 14% strength make a water droplet shape out of the bottom of our rectangle.

Step: 4

Duplicate the layer. Increase the strength of the smudge tool to about 30% and make the droplet bigger.

Set the opacity of the new layer down to about 50%.

Step: 5

Use the Light Rays tutorial to make a whole bunch of light rays around our beam. Each on its own layer of course.

Step: 6

If some of the light rays dont fit in well you can use the liquify tool to bend them a little. You should now have something like this.

Step: 7

Merge all the Light Rays onto one layer. Duplicate that layer a few times and add various blur effects. I used motion blur at 52 degrees and then on another copy of the light rays layer motion blur at -52 degrees. Then I added a layer of Gaussian blur to make the rays look like they are glowing.

Step: 8

We are now going to add some dust particles. Using the Dust Particles tutorial make dust around the rays.

Step: 9

Duplicate the dust layer a few times and add various blur settings. I used radial blur to give the beam the effect that it was moving really fast. And some Gaussian blur to give the dust a glow.