Design a colorful Northern Lights landscape
- By Vlad Gerasimov
- Published 06/3/2009
- Effects
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Rating:
Repeat these steps for each Light that you want to add. Let me show you quick previews without much comments:
To add more lights, simply repeat the steps above.
Next
step is: water and reflections. Create new layer, set foreground color
to dark blue, switch to Shape tool (U), select Rectangle tool and draw
rectangle where water is supposed to be.
Open
Layer Blending Options (Layer menu - Layer style - Blending Options).
Add Gradient Overlay (black-to-white), check Reverse (so that black is
on top), set gradient Blend mode to Multiply.
Create
new (temporary) document, with width and height 50% of our water
rectangle. Fill with grey color, then apply some noise (Filters menu -
Noise - Add Noise, amount = 20-30). Then change Image Size (Image menu
- Image size) to 200%.
Select
all (Ctrl-A), copy (Ctrl-C), close temporary file, paste into our
original file (Ctrl-V) so that it covers the water rectangle.
Go to Filters menu - Blur - Motion blur. Set Angle to 0, Distance to 30-50 pixels (please experiment).
Go to Edit menu - Transform - Perspective, drag lower edge as shown here.
Set
layer Blend mode to Overlay, and opacity to 15-20%. Now the water is
almost invisible, but do not worry! We'll add reflections and it will
look better.
Hide all layers except Lights. Select all (Ctrl-A) and copy merged (Ctrl-Shift-C).
Show
all layers again. Select the layer with water, paste lights (Ctrl-V)
and flip vertical (Edit menu - Transform - Flip vertical). Move lights
down inside the water.
Transform (Ctrl-T) and squeeze the layer vertically.
Apply Blur (Filters menu - Blur - Gaussian Blur), radius = 20-30px.
And finally, change layer Blend mode to Linear Dodge and Opacity to 40-50%. Done!
The last step is to add some stars to top of dark sky. You can read about drawing stars in my previous tutorials, Making of Rainbow or Making of Christmas Night . Thanks for reading!
URL: http://www.vladstudio.com
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7 Responses to "Design a colorful Northern Lights landscape" 
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said this on 06 Jun 2009 7:01:41 PM CDT
I so love this. it's amazing. very beautiful and I will try it out myself.
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said this on 07 Jun 2009 8:53:19 AM CDT
It is absolutely amazing, thanks for sharing.
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said this on 14 Jun 2009 10:14:10 AM CDT
Too Awesome.. Thanks :)
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said this on 20 Jun 2009 3:25:33 AM CDT
Bravo! ;D Exelent work done here! =] There was a tut, how to make same effect in Illustrator... ;) I love the light near the horizon line!
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said this on 06 Aug 2009 2:13:10 PM CDT
dude this tutorial is awesome i cant wait to show my friend this tutorial i love how you added the reflections in the water the Christmas stars tut was a bit confusing but never the less this was the simplest written tutorial for photoshop yet one thing though show more of where the layers should be thanks so much a rating from one to ten a million
the photoshop dudes ps can i put this review on my website Vlad Gerasimov
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