Hello!

Can anyone help me how to achieve the following effect?
The effect is something similar to when the sun passes through the clouds and you can see the beams.
In my case, we have a black background, a hole on it, e.g. the word "hello", and beneath it there is a very strong burst of light, so you have beams coming out of the hole (or the word).

On the attached image, i've achieved the opposite. I was playing with the rotation, wind, then the perspective filters/transfomration.

The clear, perhaps glowing white letters should be behind, or underneath the beams, and not on top.

I've recently migrated from PaintShop to PS, and I really want to do it in PS, to justify my investment. I know it might be completed, any ideas, suggestions are appreciated.

Thank you

Fuli

Hi Fuli, Congratulations on the migration ;) Let's see what we can do about justifing your investment... retrocity

Hello! I must say wow! Thank you lundqvist! This is in fact very very close to the effect I was trying to achieve! Thank you!

I think the main trick is to have your letters be at less than 100% white so that you can have some dark and light streaks in front of them. I've deliberately exagerated the effect in this example. - Ken Heronheart -

Yes, definetly it looks much closer to what i had in mind! Though I would like to have the beams bursting out in all directions, I think something to be done with the perspective effect. The above link looks very promising. Could you just, list the effects you have used to create this? Thank you for taking the time helping me!

First try with above effect,(following the link) some modifs still need to be done...

The main ones were motion blur and a layer mask to get rid of the parts of the blur I didn't want. To get the beams going in all directions, I added some white around the edges of the leters with the airbrush set to "dissolve" and used the radial blur on zoom at 100%. In the first example I also used the liquify tool on the letters before blurring them to get the "curtain effect". I also used an outer glow effect layer on the letters. The main thing to remember is that you want some dark streaks as well as light.

Wow! This is it!!! Perfect! Congratulations! I'll try to redo it myself now...

I'm sorry, i've tried to follow your guides but still no chance. You've motion blurred the text selection in quick mask mode,then cleared in selection mode? I assume you did it before applying the radial blur. How about the outer glow style? Please could you give me some more hints? Thank you Fuli

Sorry, I must not have been clear. My Algebra teacher always complained that I left out steps when doing proofs at the board. No quick mask mode. Duplicate your text, rasterize it, "rough up" the edges a little bit using the airbrush in diffuse mode, color black. Do the same thing with white in areas where you want extra light. Then hit it with Radial Blur a couple times. Be sure to move the center of the blur to the center of your text. Now erase the parts of the blur that are obscuring the parts of your text that you want to see. You can do that with the eraser, but I prefer to add a "Layer Mask" and use a soft airbrush, color black to do it. You'll probably want to add a "Levels Adjustment Layer" on top of everything and slide the white arrow on the right towards the center in order to brighten up the image when you're done. I'll try and post a step by step later today. Part of the problem is that I rarely do anything the same way twice. Right now I have to go "pretend to work". Keep trying. I just upgraded to PS 7 and am only now getting around to trying some features that were added in 5.5 - Ken -

Ken, Great job with the effect, and thanks for the mini-tut! I can see quite a few possibilities with some variations... :) retrocity

Thank you Ken! I am very close now... I've been experimetnig with applying the effect for each letter, separately. It takes a lot more time, but with the actions... but still takes a lot more time. I am doing the opposite now. I am working, but pretending not to work (I am on holiday for 3 months in Marseille!) Cheers! Balin

Glad to hear it's working for you. Remember, Photoshop is the ultimate game, it doesn't count as work if you're enfoying it. Let me know if you need me to do the step by step with pictures. - Ken -

This effect is really simple 1. create a new image in RGB mode and fill it with Black 2. add your text 3. load the selection (select -> load selection) and set the "Channel" to the text layer 4. with the selection still active flatten the layer (layer -> flatten image) and feather the selection (select -> feather), try out different pixel values [this was 2] for the "feather radius" 5. apply the radial blur TWICE (filter -> blur -> radial blur) with the following settings: Amount: 100 Blur method: Zoom Quality: Best 6. inverse the selection (select -> inverse) and once again apply the "radial blur filter" using the same settings as before 7. deselect Hope this tutorial is of use Drag0n98