Design With a Thought – Design/Marketing Blog

Step 1. The image. Find any image that has any rays of light in it, sky, anything that has this natural “gradient” like looking thing in it. I always duplicate the background layer and hide it. So you might as well do the same. Hit Ctrl+J and hide the layer.

Note: Actually, almost any image will do for this sort of purpose. To be honest i tried it with almost any stock that has natural light like desert scenes, roads, anything really, and it always works. I end up with all kinds of “bits and dust” that i can possibly imagine, some looking like ripped off clothes, so experiment a lot!

Step 2. Magic wand as a source of magic dust.

Grab the magic wand tool. Set tolerance to something like 15-30, but you can always change that and experiment more to get different looks.

Start selecting parts of the image and hitting delete button every time you select something. You should end up with something pretty much the same as on the image below.

Zoom in and see the magic happen! Hehe. These are those magical bits that we’re going to use in the next image. Grab the Lasso Tool and select the line of dust as shown below. Hit Ctrl+C to copy it.

Step 3. Ways to use the dust.
Now let’s find some use for it. Find an image that you want to use it one and open it up.  Paste in our magic dust (Ctrl+V). Hit Ctrl+J to duplicate the layer and hide it again (so that you keep the source).

Double click the copy layer and just have a look at the properties i gave to mine.

Now let’s give it some life and position it right. Wrap tool is a great way to do that. Click Edit – Transform – Wrap and position/deform the dust the way you want it to flow. You might want to erase some unnecessary/overlapping bits.

Double click the layer again and let’s play more with layer styles. I’ve added Outer glow that is set to overlay and Bevel and Emboss effect with blue color. Now duplicate the layer again (ctrl+J). Use the wrap tool and deform your dust again (Or just grab another piece of dust from your other image, paste it in and copy the layer style from previous one). Change the color of Outer glow in layer styles to yellow/greenish sort of color and Overlay opacity to 100%. See next image for settings.

Lets sharpen up the dust and go Filter – Sharpen – Sharpen.  Do the same for both layers. Now activate the very first layer, transform it the way you want it, position it and then hit Image – Adjustments – Brightnes/Contrast. See the next image for settings. Set the layer to Overlay or Color Dodge and position how u like it. You can throw in Motion Blur or Gaussian blur, duplicate it to create multi-dimensional look, the possibilities are endless…

Now i just added a lot of overlay layers and threw in soft dots with white/bright  yellow soft brush. See the PSD file to get the idea of what i did. It’s not really related to the subject, but it’s a nice technique to use in cope with dust.