This tutorial will guide you how to create a hollywood style, spotlight effect, and i believe is very fitting with us being in the current time of year where we can’t avoid the bright lights of Hollywood with all the awards ceremonies which are currently taking place. This effect will show you how to make beams of light and realistic looking spotlights.
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.
