Summary: Create a custom made sparkle brush in Photoshop, then use it to easily add a classic sparkle trail to a photo!

Written by Steve Patterson
Exclusively for Photoshop Essentials.com.

Part of our complete collection of Photo Effects tutorials.

In this Photoshop Effects tutorial, we'll learn how to add a sparkle trail to a photo using a custom Photoshop sparkle brush we'll be creating. I got the idea for this tutorial after seeing the poster for the movie "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium", but of course sparkle trails have been around since the days of Peter Pan and Tinkerbell, and I'm sure even long before that.

Fortunately, Photoshop makes them extremely easy to create thanks to the powerful brush controls that were introduced in Photoshop 7, which are still just as powerful and useful today!

Here's the image I'll be starting with:

I'm going to make her magic wand look a little more magical by adding a sparkle trail. Here's how it will look when we're done:

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Let's get started.

Step 1: Open A New Photoshop Document

As I mentioned, we'll be creating our sparkle trail using a custom made Photoshop "sparkle" brush, and the first thing we need to do is create our brush. To begin, go up to the File menu at the top of the screen and choose New, which brings up Photoshop's New Document dialog box. You can also access the New Document dialog box using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+N (Win) / Command+N. Enter 200 pixels for the Width and 200 pixels for the Height, and make sure the Background Contents option near the bottom is set to White so our new document has a white background, then click OK:

Photoshop opens a new 200x200 document with a solid white background:

Step 2: Select The Brush Tool

With our new document created, select the Brush Tool from the Tools palette, or simply press the letter B on your keyboard to access it with the shortcut:

Step 3: Set Your Foreground Color To Black

We need black as our Foreground color, which is the color Photoshop uses to paint with when we have the Brush Tool selected, so if black is not currently your Foreground color, press the letter D on your keyboard to quickly reset your Foreground and Background colors, which sets black as your Foreground color (white becomes your Background color). We can see our current Foreground and Background colors in the color swatches near the bottom of the Tools palette (the swatch in the upper left is the Foreground color and the one in the bottom right is the Background color):