Amazing Glows & Gradients in Photoshop | Illustration Tutorial

in this video i'm going to show you how to add these soft gradient and glows to your designs and illustrations in photoshop to add form and really bring them to life [Music] i designed this scene for a big collaborative project with 60 amazing other animators called lots of love that i released recently so go and check that out if you haven't yet i designed this in illustrator to get these clean vector shapes knowing that i would export it into photoshop for shading and everything i wanted to shade was on its own separate layer the best way to export out of illustrator into photoshop and keep all of your layers is go up to file export export as make sure use artboards is selected save it whatever you want click export and then on this menu choose your resolution and make sure that you have right layers maximum editability selected click ok and that creates a photoshop file a psd that's exactly the same as your illustrator file with all of your layers separated and i've added some into their own folders and color coded them just so it's easier for me to keep track of i'm using a 22-inch desktop cintiq to do this shading but for some simpler shapes you could get by fine just using a mouse so first off let's select our brush tool and we're going to select a soft round brush just the very basic one that's all we need and i'm going to open up my planet main folder and create a new layer above our planet main layer let's increase the size of our brush with our right square brackets tool and i'm going to press alt on my keyboard and eye drop this background color and that's the same reason i have this color palette at the top so that i can just easily eye drop any color i need and i'm going to start by shading in a crescent on the bottom right of this layer assuming the light source is coming from the top left and you can see that my strokes are covering a lot of the other layers and i've got the ring around the planet separated into a couple of layers so that'll be easy to animate but it doesn't matter that they're covering them here because we're going to stop all that by using a clipping mask let's hide the background layer so we can see a bit more what's going on so here we've got our first gradient glow layer and i'm going to make this a clipping mask of our planet main layer simply by holding the alt key or option key on a mac and hovering over until you get this icon which has this l-shaped arrow pointing down let's click on that and now that applies that layer only to the layer underneath our planet main let's turn our background back on so now we've got our planet receding into darkness on the bottom right but i'm going to add something a bit more interesting to this gradient here with our planet main selected i'm going to click on adding another layer and that will create a new clipping mask layer underneath our other one let's eye drop the blue color here and i'm going to click and add a bit more of a this saturated blue gradient underneath and i like the way this gives just a bit more saturation as we fade in from light to dark here and then i'm going to create a new layer on top make that a clipping mask again and this time i'm going to eye drop the pink layer and i'm also going to reduce my brush size and then i'm going to click and just find the edge here and then just go slowly around it i don't want to go too far something like that is fine and then we just get a nice bit of room lighting and a really useful shortcut that you might not be aware of is that you can quickly toggle between the opacity of your brush by pressing any of the numbers in the row above your letters on the keyboard so if i press 5 my brush drops to 50 opacity so i can be a bit more liberal applying my brush strokes and often i'll go down to maybe two or even one to just add some real subtlety to these layers i think i might go up to maybe four which is forty percent let's take my brush size down low and just add a bit of pink to the edge here as if this is light reflecting off these rings here there we are let's increase a bit of the pink glow on the bottom right here let's have one coming in from the top left as well i think that'll look interesting now let's add some glow behind the planet which is going to look a bit more like its atmosphere so let's create a new layer and drag that underneath planet main and i'm going to select our bright blue layer and i'm really going to increase our brush size here and then i'm going to start just lightly drawing around the edge of our planet we're still on 40 brush size and then i'm going to lower my brush down a little bit and just come in a bit tighter around the edge there we are and now i'm going to create a new layer and eye drop this pink color and then go in and just add a pink glow around there as well so i'm working with this brush size which is 250 but i'm also going to drop down lower i'm going to just create more of a tighter glow around the edge of the planet and what i want to do here by going with a smaller brush size is i want to lose the edge of the planet here see if we zoom out it kind of looks a bit sort of fuzzy there isn't a clear defined edge and i really like that look it means that the light is really intense that we can't even tell what the form of the planet is and it kind of has a nice soft 80s look which i really like this video is sponsored by skillshare skillshare offers thousands of inspiring classes to creative and curious people on topics like animation illustration design freelancing and more it has classes for every skill level taught by some of the best in the industry with short classes so you don't have to put your life on hold and it makes it easy to explore new topics and passions without a huge commitment just some of the amazing classes that i'm inspired by are character animation basics creating a dance loop with after effects in photoshop by b grand nettie motion graphics in cinema 4d design an 80s inspired animated gif by gustavo torres simple character animation by fraser davidson and illustration for designers create your own geometric animal by dkng studios and i'm sure it comes as no surprise that i believe that the best investment you can make is in your own education and skillshare is ridiculously affordable it's less than ten dollars a month with an annual subscription so it is a no-brainer the first 1 000 of my subscribers to click the link in the description will get a two-month free trial of premium membership so you can explore your own creativity now i definitely want to add some cast shadows as well from these eyes and lips as well so i'm going to create a new clipping mask above that planet main layer i'm going to select a background color the darkest color we have maybe drop that down to 30 and with our brush set again pretty small i'm just going to draw around the bottom right edges of these shapes and i've got my left hands fingers on ctrl alt z because i'm always undoing and then trying again if i don't hit the line exactly where i need to there's a lot of control z and undoing in this process and that's also part of the reason why i'm not naming these layers at the moment i'm not laying these you know pink highlight blue shadow black shadow because during this process i experiment with a lot of colors and sometimes end up deleting a lot of layers so there's no point naming all of them if i'm only going to delete half of them again later now normally you should be labeling all your layers but in this instance it just makes sense to not label these ones okay we've got some nice shadows going on here let's create another layer underneath that again select a more saturated blue and we're going to add some blue underneath that as well which is going to darken up these shadows but also add some color and saturation into them there that's pretty good another thing that's useful to do is to select our layer we can press v to get off our brush tool and just have our selection tool here and we can use those same shortcuts the number keys on our keyboard to alter the opacity of our layer so if we press 5 this layer goes down to 50 opacity 8 it goes to 80 and i often just play around with these if i find if the shadow is looking a bit too intense i might just drop the layer opacity down to maybe 50 percent let's try that on both of them and maybe make the saturated 100 and then the dark one may be down to 50. and i do a lot of experimenting with that because it's really easy and it's non-destructive as well so we can always undo this and take it back to 100 and make any changes from there and it's pretty much the same process for all the objects here i'll show you a bit how i do the eyes i'm going to create a new clipping mask above our eyes group select our red color to do the shading in here cover up the bottom right of those hearts with this red color again my brush is at 30 percent then on a new layer i'm going to select a yellow color and color in the top left i think i might want to make my brush 100 yellow for this so it's nice and bright and there we are just cover the top left of these hearts and then let's create one more clipping mask i'm going to select a pink that's the middle of our heart make our brush eyes really low and then just cover up the very edges of these hearts to create a nice bit of rim lighting the same as we did on our planet and that is just going to create a bit of separation between them and the shadows and now i can see over here on this heart on the left we've got a bit of the yellow coming in here from the layer underneath so i'm just going to select my eraser tool and this yellow layer and just delete that yellow section here because i don't really want that on this left heart and then continue with that rim lighting and in a few minutes we've already shaded in a lot of this image now a couple of things you need to be aware of when working with gradients that are this soft is banding banding is where you save an image and there's some really clean barriers between all the colors in your gradient now the best way to combat that is to add some noise to your image and you can be pretty subtle with it my method of adding noise from an image like this is to select a new fill color and make that 50 gray i'll take everything else back to zero and make the black value 50 so again perfectly middle gray press alt and delete on our keyboard which will create a new layer with that fill i'm going to right click and select convert to smart object and then i'm going to change this blending mode to overlay and because this is 50 gray it's not gonna have any impact on the colors underneath but when we add the filter noise add noise let's add 10 so we can really see the effect it adds noise to that layer and the overlay blending mode makes it really obvious within the gradients less so within the big flat colors like the background middle of our planet here but in these gradients you can see a lot more of the noise now 10 is obviously way too much we've got way too much going on here and that's why we've made this a smart object we can double click on the add noise over here five is probably good enough for this and that'll really help with the banding now i always love to add textures to my images so i'm going to drag in a paper texture this one is of some paper painted black and i'm going to change the blending mode to screen add a curves effect with control m just increase the black point a bit and there we have got a nice 80s looking sort of soft gradient texture across this whole image and when we've got the whole image shaded it looks like this doing the final shading of my illustrations is my absolute favorite part of the process so please give this a go and tag me on instagram with anything you make using this technique i would love to see it to discover the best ways to learn motion design i've created a short playlist of videos that i think you'll enjoy if you've made it this far please like the video and consider subscribing if you'd like more of these videos every week i'll see you in the next [Music] video

Channel: Ben Marriott

Views: 157,610

Keywords: adobe photoshop tutorial, illustration tutorial, how to make gradients in photoshop, how to add glow in photoshop, glow effect photoshop, gradient adjustment layer, gradient fill photoshop, gradient color, color effect photoshop, colorful gradient design, photoshop gradient, Best glow effect, how to make things glow in photoshop, soft glow tutorial, how to create dreamy effect in photoshop, glow effect tutorial, gradient in photoshop, ben marriott

Id: hlG6oPxnZCo

Length: 10min 15sec (615 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 11 2020