Photoshop Sparkles: Add A Sparkle Trail To A Photo

Step 9: Select the "Starburst - Small" Brush

With the Assorted Brushes added in the Brushes palette, scroll down the list until you come to the Starbust - Small brush and click on it to select it:

Step 10: Click In Three Or Four Random Spots Inside The Document

With the "Starburst - Small" brush selected, click in another three or four random spots inside the document to add the rest of our sparkles:

Step 11: Define A New Brush Preset

We've added all of our sparkles. All we need to do now is save them as a brush. To do that, go up to the Edit menu at the top of the screen and choose Define Brush Preset. Photoshop will pop up a dialog box asking you to name the brush. I'm going to name mine "Sparkle Brush":

Click OK after you've entered in a name and your new brush is created! You can close out of the brush document at this point, since we no longer need to have it open. No need to save it when Photoshop asks, since the brush is already created.

Step 12: Open A Photo And Add A New Blank Layer

With our "sparkle brush" now created, we can add our sparkle trail to a photo, so go ahead and open the photo you want to use if it isn't open already. Then click on the New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette to add a new blank layer above the Background layer, which is the layer that contains our image. Photoshop will automatically name the new layer "Layer 1". Double-click directly on the name and rename it to "Sparkles":

Step 13: Select The Brush Tool Once Again

We need to select the "Sparkle Brush" we just created, but in order to select it, we first need to have the Brush Tool selected, so go ahead and either select it from the Tools palette or press B on your keyboard:

Step 14: Set Your Foreground Color To White

Our sparkle trail wouldn't look very impressive it we created it in black, so we need to set our Foreground color to white. To do that, simply press X on our keyboard to swap your current Foreground and Background colors, which will set white as your Foreground color (black becomes your Background color). Again, we can see this in the color swatches near the bottom of the Tools palette: