Photoshop Sparkles: Add A Sparkle Trail To A Photo

Step 21: Drag Out Your Sparkle Trail

Our "Sparkle Brush" has been created and the options have been set in the Brushes palette, so with white as our Foreground color, we can go ahead and add our sparkle trail! To do that, click either or or just beside the object that's creating the sparkle trail (the girl's magic wand in my image) and then drag out a brush stroke in the direction you want the sparkle trail to be coming from. You'll probably need to resize your brush first, and the easiest way to do that is by using the left and right bracket keys on your keyboard. The left bracket key makes the brush smaller and the right bracket key makes it larger.

I'm going to click just to the left of the girl's magic wand and then drag my brush over her head and down the right side, as if the sparkle trail was created by her waving the wand. Notice how Photoshop fades the size of the brush as the brush stroke gets further and further from the starting point, until the brush eventually fades to nothing, thanks to the options we set in the Brushes palette:

Step 22: Duplicate The Sparkles Layer

With the "Sparkles" layer selected in the Layers palette, use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac) to duplicate the layer. A copy of the layer will appear above the original in the Layers palette:

Step 23: Apply The "Gaussian Blur" Filter

We're going to add a bit of a glow to our sparkles, and we'll do that by adding a slight blurring effect to the duplicate layer we just created. Go up to the Filter menu at the top of the screen, choose Blur, and then choose Gaussian Blur. When the Gaussian Blur dialog box appears, enter a Radius value of about 4 pixels:

You may want to go a bit higher if you're using a high resolution image. The idea is simply to add enough of a blur that the sparkles appear to have a faint glow around them:

Step 24: Duplicate The "Sparkles Copy" Layer

To increase the brightness of our sparkles, with the "Sparkles copy" layer selected, once again use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac) to create a duplicate of it, which appears at the top of the Layers palette:

Step 25: Add An "Outer Glow" Layer Style

To complete the effect, let's add a bit of color to the glow around the sparkles. To do that, with the top layer selected in the Layers palette, click on the Layer Styles icon at the bottom of the Layers palette (the icon that looks like the letter "f") and select Outer Glow from the list:

This brings up the Layer Style dialog box with the Outer Glow options in the middle column. Choose a color for your glow by clicking on the color swatch directly below the word "Noise" and choosing a color from Photoshop's Color Picker. I'm going to choose a pinkish-red color for mine. Then decrease the intensity of the color by lowering the Opacity of the glow. I'm going to lower mine to about 60%:

Click OK to exit out of the Layer Style dialog box, and you're done!

Here, once again, is my original image:

And here, after adding some color to the glow around the sparkles, is my final result:

And there we have it!

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