1.) Begin with a new document. You can either use a photo, or create one yourself, you can just use a block gradient of colour too, once you have created your document choose the polygon lasso tool – hold down your mouse on the lasso tool to reveal the polygon one.

2.) The polygon lasso tool doesn’t work with dragging like most tools, to work the Polygon Lasso, you click at the origin. As you move your cursor, a line will follow it and you then have to click again to create a line.

3.) Keep clicking in the shape of a triangle, this doesn’t have to be exact, but try to be as accurate as you can. To complete the selection, hover your mouse over the origin – this is the first place you clicked. You will see little circle. This circle means that you will complete the selection if you click on the start point – so click on the point! 

4.) As soon as you click on the start point, you will notice the marching ants selection. Now, we are ready to fill with color. Reset your foreground/background colours by pressing the ‘D’ key. Press the ‘X’ key to swap the color. White should now be the foreground color.

5.) Choose the Gradient tool and you then need to go to the options bar at the top and choose two things, click the gradient to open the options, select the foreground to transparent option and make sure that you choose the linear gradient option. Finally, make sure that the transparent option is turned on in the options bar at the top and reverse is off.

6.) Create a new layer and select it, so we don’t add pixels to the background. Click at the bottom of the selection. Drag the gradient along the selection, but not past the selection.

7.) Release the mouse and you now have a gradient. Turn off the selection by pressing CTRL/CMD+D or clicking away with the selection tool. Change the shape by pressing CTRL/CMD+T for the free transform tool. Right click for additional options such as perspective. Change the shape to suit your needs by dragging any of the little squares – these are known as adjustment handles.

8.) You should now have a spotlight, but it lacks realism because the beams have hard edges. To soften the beams, choose Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. 

9.) To add more beams, Duplicate the layers and use free transform to change the angles.

This effect works well with a photograph which is underexposed and could be touched up with just a little bit of levels or curves. Instead of just brightening the image which would be our natural instant, an interesting effect is to create the look of a spotlight.

1.) Begin by creating a selection with the elliptical marquee tool, Choose Select > Transform Selection and a bounding box will appear, this will give you the ability to rotate, scale and resize the selected area. 

2.) Press enter/return to apply the transformation to the selection, the next step is to create a curves adjustment layer, choose a new adjustment layer from the bottom of the layers palette and select curves.

3.) This will then open a dialog box, which is for curves, move the mouse from the box and over to the image, the cursor will then change into an eyedropper tool. 

4.) Click and drag and a circle will appear on the diagonal line of the curve. This is the tonal range of the area that you are moving the mouse over. Take a note of where the range is on the curve.

5.) Click and drag on the curve. Move the point up and notice that the image will be lightened. Looking at the layers palette, you will see the adjustment layer with a layer mask applied. Notice that the area of the mask where the selection was present is now white, click the mask to make it active. 

6.) The light edge needs to be softened, do this by choosing the options, Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur 

7.) Remove the effect from the areas that would be in shadow and not illuminated in real life, e.g. such as the air, choose black for the foreground color and select the brush tool, click and drag the paintbrush and you will paint away the adjustment from the regions you desire because you are painting on a mask 

8.) And that should be it! This is a great effect and you can lower the opacity of the adjustment layer if you desire to tone down the effect a little, a great way to draw attention to certain areas of an image.

Zoom effects can be done through using a camera, but you can also get some interesting results when you use certain filters in Photoshop. This effect works great when used on photographs of moving objects, especially motor-sport photographs, but the effect can be just as stunning when used on still images.

1.) The first step is to choose your image you would like to work with, and then choose the elliptical marquee tool from the toolbox. Once you have chosen the tool you need to make a selection on your image, you can also hold down the spacebar to reposition the selection as you are drawing it.

2.) Now, it’s important to feather the selection. If you don’t the effect will be too harsh and obvious. The feather creates a soft edge and a smooth transition to the blurred areas. So you need to choose the options Select > Modify > Feather. Change the size of the feather radius depending on the resolution.

3.) Right now you have a selection around the center of the image, and you want to select everything but the center. Choose Select > Inverse and you should see the selection go around the edge of your page now.

4.) Next choose the options Filter > Blur > Radial Blur and choose Zoom as the method, select good for quality. Choose your amount to suit. For a heavier blur use 100. You might have to test it and undo a few times to get exactly what looks best on your image.

5.) Changing the feather and the blur amount will change the effect. Experiment with different shaped selections and different amounts of blur. In some cases you may want to apply the blur more than once.

This tutorial works with images that have a good range of hightlights/midtones/shadows but lack of shadows obscuring any parts of the face if you are using this effect on an image of a person. Other images may need a lot of color correcting before they could be made suitable for use in this tutorial, especially as regards shadows on the face. Choose your images wisely before starting the tutorial. 

1.) Open your image. Duplicate the background layer and give it a useful name. Save to PSD to get your working file established.

2.) Make sure your new layer (not the background) is highlighted and run menu option Image > Adjustments > Threshold… The default value in the Threshold dialog box is 128 and then increase or decrease the threshold until you are satisfied with how it looks then press OK. 

3.) Highlight the threshold layer and go to Filter > Stylize > Diffuse then Select Anisotropic mode and press OK.

4.) Run menu option Select > Color Range and use the eyedropper to sample the black portion of the image, then run the Fuzziness slider in the Color Range dialog box up to 200. Press OK. The black portion of the image should now be surrounded by marching ants.

5.) Run menu option Select > Save Selection and give the selection a name and press OK. Press CTRL-D to deselect. You will reload the selection later.

6.) Make a new layer on top of the others. Select the Paint Bucket tool. Set the tool to fill with a pattern rather than a color and fill the new layer. You can use one of Photoshop’s built-in patterns. 

7.) Make another new layer on top of the others and fill it with white. Add a layer mask to this layer by pressing the Add Layer Mask button on the Layers palette.

8.) Run menu option Select > Load Selection and choose the selection you saved earlier from the dropdown menu in the Load Selection dialog box and press OK.

9.) Go to Edit > Fill and fill the selection with black (which should correspond to your current background color if the mask layer is highlighted). Though you’ve filled the selection with black, you won’t see black in the image. What you should see is the pattern fill from the layer below showing through where the selected mask was filled. Press CTRL-D to deselect. 

10.) With the mask layer still highlighted, select the Brush tool and choose a large, hard-edged brush – around size 19. Painting on the mask with white as the foreground color, paint over those parts of the image you might not need, assuming you see extra stuff that doesn’t need to be there.

This tutorial will show you a quick way to use photoshop to create a trendy, effective, two-tone silhouette effect. Once you have mastered creating the two-tone silhouette effect you can experiment with different colours and filters. 

1.) First you need to start with the photo you want to apply the effect to, any photograph will work well with this effect as long as it is of a good quality. 

2.) You then need to duplicate your layer, this isn’t essential but it helps if you make a mistake when completing the design, then desaturate your duplicated layer, you do this by using Image > Adjust > Desaturate. 

3.) Now go to Filter > Artistic > Cutout and use settings similar to the following:

Number of Levels: 2

Edge Simplicity: 3/4

Edge Fidelity: 3

4.) The next step is to go to Image > Adjustments > Levels to bring up the Levels Dialog Box. Drag your sliders very close to each other, until your image is only black and white.

5.) Your image will probably have some pretty jagged edges. To fix this go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Enter a value of around 2.0 pixels, or whichever makes your edges look smoothed.

6.) Bring up the Curves Dialog Box by going to Image > Adjustments > Curves. Adjust the curves so the edge blurriness is gone, but there is still no jagged edges. You could get a little more advanced with this by masking your subject out (cutting out) first, then running through the steps, this could give you the option to have a coloured background etc. 

This short tutorial shows you how to create the effect of arcing current in the air. Because it uses the “Difference Clouds” filter, the effect can look different every time you try it, as that particular filter changes each time you use it. 

1. Open a new file. Make it 500 x 500 pixels, this is a nice size to work with for this tutorial. 

2. Next you need to set the foreground colour of the file to black and the background to a light grey.

3. Select the gradient tool and then in the tool options bar, set the gradient to Foreground to Background.

4. Drag the gradient tool diagonally across the image from one corner to another.

5. The next step choose Filters > Render > Difference Clouds, which as said earlier will give a different effect each time you use it. 

6. Now Invert the colours in the image by pressing Ctrl + I.

7. After doing this you need to choose Image > Adjustments > Levels to open the Levels dialog box. Drag the black slider to the right to dramatically darken the image, when doing this the effect of “electrical currents” should become apparent.

At this stage the electrical current looks very realistic but if you would like to add some extra colour to the image you can play choose Image > Adjustments > Variations. From the Variations dialog you can add colour by clicking directly on any of the preview images. Each time you click on the preview images the colour will change.