Hi,

This is the first time I have made a tutorial and I am still learning all the tricks but anyway, here is a tutorial on making an ‘alien’ glow effect with a background.

If you don’t like the way I have done it then you can achieve a similar effect with layer styles…

Create a new image and fill it with a light colour.We’ll call this colour ‘one’. Make the foreground colour a lighter colour of the same hue (we’ll call this colour ‘two’) and the background black. Then go filter > render > difference clouds. set the bending mode of the layer to Hard Light. It should look something like this, depending on the colour you chose first up:

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Now make another layer with a black to ‘two’ gradient in it like this:

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then change the blending mode to Hard Light on the gradient layer. Now make a new layer filled with 50% grey and change the opacity to 85% on that layer. Go to the eraser tool and get a big, soft brush. Draw the shape you want to have. Set the blending mode to Linear Burn. Duplicate the layer, change the blending mode  to Difference, and set the opacity to about 10% (or whatever looks right.) You should get something like this:

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get the elliptical marquee tool and draw a circle around the shape. invert the selection with Select > Inverse. Go to Select > modify > feather and choose a radius of about 20px to blur the edges. make another layer and fill the selection with black. Make the blending mode soft light with an opacity of 65%. if you want you can take the selection and isolate the shape, but I’m going to leave it as it is.

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The finished piece…
Thanks for reading,

Oscar