How to Create a Wall of Lights Photo Effect: Photoshop in 60 Seconds

Final product image — What You’ll Be Creating

Learn how to create epic photo effects in under a minute! Check out this quick lesson below.

Photoshop in 60 Seconds: Wall of Lights

Make your photos stand out with an intense wall of lights effect. This effect works great for rock stars, athletes, and so much more! In this video, I’ll show you how to create a beaming wall of lights from scratch using this light bulb reference and simple Photoshop brushes.

Watch the process unfold and get all the details you need in the process below. And head on over to GraphicRiver for more amazing brushes.

How to Create a Wall of Lights in Adobe Photoshop

Start with a New Document at 850 x 600 pixels.

Use the Paint Bucket Tool (G) to Fill the background with dark brown #1b120f.

Now use the Elliptical Marquee Tool (M) to make a circular extraction from the light bulb picture. Copy and Paste it into the document, using the Free Transform Tool (Control-T) to adjust its size.

Duplicate (Control-J) this layer several times to make a single row of bulbs, and then Merge the layers together. Make several more rows of duplicated bulbs using the same process until you have an entire wall of lights.

Merge all the bulb layers together and set the Layer Blend Mode to Divide.

Now for the shine. Create a New Layer and use a Soft Round Brush with 20% Hardness to paint bright yellow #fffad3 onto each bulb. Lower the Brush Opacity to 50% for some or vary which ones you want to shine.

Set this Layer Blend Mode to Linear Dodge. Then create another New layer and set it to Pin Light to help illuminate them some more. Use a large, Soft Round Brush for this step.

Finish the wall with a few lens flares using this Lens Flare Brush Pack and add your extracted subject. Here I used this American Football Player because the silhouette-like lighting already matches the effect.

Use New Layers underneath and above the subject to paint yellow back-lighting to match the scene. And don’t forget to add more flares!

Here is the final result.

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