In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we’re going to look at how to add colorful streaks of light to a photo. You’ve probably seen these light streaks used in ads for everything from shampoo to cellphones, and in fact they were used most recently in a cool ad for a new cellphone from Sprint and Samsung. Creating them is as easy as drawing a path with Photoshop’s Pen Tool and then stroking the path with a brush, with a couple of simple layer styles used to add the actual color and light effect. It’s all fairly easy, but if you’ve never used the Pen Tool before or you’re not sure how to draw paths, you might want to check out our Making Selections With The Pen Tool tutorial first, where I cover everything you need to know about drawing and editing paths with the Pen.

Announcing the first tutorial of a new series!
Together, with a pinch of this and a dash of that, we’ll figure out how to create this cool effect in just 30 minutes.

Ingredients:
1 normal, everyday Photoshop
1 set of real 3D text.
1 large black canvas (1600×1200px)

Last week we published our 10th Wallpaper of the Week. It was an awesome typography/design from Ginger Monkey Design called Compassion. What I really liked about that design was how they mixed some “frilly bits” with the typeface to create an outstanding piece of work. I decided to create a tutorial showing you how to do that as well.

Since we released Abduzeedo’s new design, we’ve received quite a few emails asking for a tutorial showing how to reproduce the our logo effect. Actually since the first time we used that effect, on the Sparkling Hot Girl in Photoshop tutorial, a lot of people have asked us how to do that effect. So in this very short tutorial we will show you how to do that in Photoshop

It seems that a fair amount of people want to know how I create background images like the one on this site. Well, the lovely chaps at .net magazine have given me permission to re-publish the tutorials I write for the mag on elliotjaystocks.com, so, from issue #168, here’s the first (of many) web graphics tutorials - now completely free! You’ll want to download the source files, by the way, and here’s a preview of the end result. Click the thumbnail images to view the full-size screengrabs on Flickr.