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I recently got a request to create a small tutorial on the little 'magically' lights and swirls I often use in my own pictures. The Special Effects. Photoshop is one of the best programs when it comes to Fx - it's dozons of facinating filters make for a huge varaiety of different outcomes. Here I will give a few of the basics - but it's always best to just experiment with the filters, brushes, and tools provided with photoshop. I've found that the neatest effects are usually the ones that I did on accident ^_^
Once you choose to Load Brushes from the drop down menu, it will open a window for you to loacate the brushes. Browse to the Photoshop/Goodies/Brushes folder (it will probably be here: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop 5.5\Goodies\Brushes\ ) And load the 'Assorted Brushes' file. If you have no brushes files in here, then you can skip this part ^_^. 
First - you can not use the lens flare on a transparent layer. There has to be stuff on the layer for the lens flare to work (I find this rather annoying sometimes...*grumbles*) To get to the lens flare filter, click: Filter > Render > Lens Flare. This will bring up the Lens Flare filte window, which shows a miniturized version of your image, a slider across the top the determine the intensity of the flare, and three "lens size" options at the bottom.
Below are examples of the different flares produced by the three 'lens types'.
My best advice to you, is to just play around with all the filters. Each and everyone of them does someting interesting. I usually just go around and use about 8 different filters, a bunch of brushes, mess with the hue/saturation (Image > Adjust > Hue/Saturation), mess with selections - feather selections to get a gradual fade, and usually it's just random. I sort of just go with it.
Ta da!! I have no idea how I did that! Yee! What fun! ^_^ I love Photoshop :) hehehe - well, actualy, I do have some idea. I began with a all black background. Then is used a regular small, circular paintbrush with the fade set to 200 (it's in the options window). I used about 10 different colors and I just scribbled in circles. Then I used the Airbrush and some of the 'Assorted Brushes' - some of the circle ones, and the shine-star-ish shapped ones and placed those in places with a white color - and on a new layer. I blured the background layer (Filters > Blur > Gusaiian Blur) so the paintbrush strokes weren't so defined). I flatten the layers together and then I made a circular selection (Circular Marquee) around the center of the blured brush strokes. I feathered it to 20 (Select > Feather) then inversed the selection so that everything except the center of the circle was selected. (mind you I'm saying this all from memory - and none of it was planned before I did it). I created a lensflare (105mmPrime lens setting) and placed it in the center of the circle selection. The light flares that came outside of the circle were visible, but the center - the core of the lens flare was not visible because that part wasn't selected. Then (the selection is still active) I twirled the whole thing (Filter > Distort > Twirl - and I set it up so it was a large twirl). - confused yet? - after that, I decided I wanted soemthing different with the colors - so I set the foreground color to a light blue-gray and left the background color to black (these are the colors in the toolbar - I changed them because the colors you have set to the foreground and background effect some of the filters) Then I choose to Difference Clouds (Filter > Render > Difference Clouds). This changed the colors and made that cloudy look. After that I simply used the burn tool to brighten the highlights on some of the swirls and in the center of the twirl to the lower left. Fun ne? ^_^ hehe - well - I actually think I left out a few steps, but that's pretty much what I did - random stuff with a tiny bit of logic and planning to it. Once you know what all the filters can do, you can plan stuff out better - so just experiment with them all. You can really make some neat effects.
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First - the basic 'glowy' ball of light. One way that I get this is using the special brushes that come with photoshop, but that arn't displayed on default. To load this brushes, click the small triangle in the upper right corner of the brushes window. (To see the brushes window, choose 'Window > Show Brushes')
And now to go over the even popular 'lens flare' filter that upon the first discovery of which, many photoshop newbies have a tendency to over use... hell - even I still over use it ^_^ hehee - it's just such a spiffy filter. Anyways!
