Magic hat light effect in Photoshop

Here is a great tutorial for all the Harry Potter fans out there from abduzeedo.

First of all here is the end result of this tutorial:

Step 1

Create a radial gradient, in this case from a purple to a really dark purple.

Step 2

Add a really cool Icon of a magic hat from the Crystal Clear Collection by Everaldo.

Step 3

Add some text and apply the Distort/Wave filter. Create two stripes of text.

Step 4

Rotate and place the text.

Step 5

Add some light using glow: Use different values for each line of text, the secret here is the blending option COLOR DODGE. Change the values of Spread, Size and Range.

Step 6

Group the 2 lines of texts and with one apply a mask to make the stripes disappear at their ends.

Step 7

With the other group of text apply a Gaussian blur, after that delete some parts to show the non-blury text. This will add a movement feel to the text, like they are really being magicaly created.

Step 8

Create a new layer below the text and with a regular big brush like 100px add a spot of light in white. The layer must be below the text, otherwise the glow will not affect the white spot.

Step 9

Make some smoke again, I used the eraser, you could've used the liquify as well.

Step 10

Create a cloud: to do that make use a marquee with feather set to a value bigger than 20 and apply the render>clouds holding the Apple (Cmd) key on Mac OS X or CTRL on Windows. Apply the COLOR DODGE blending options on it.

Step 11

Sparks: For the sparks create a brush, play with the shape dynamics, scatering, and other dynamics. After that, apply a Outer Glow and Inner Glow to create the magic effect.

Final result again

The whole process takes about 35 minutes. It is really cool is to apply the color dodge blending option to the folder, and put blurred elements inside it. Using it you can create some really amazing light effects.

The PSD files can be downloaded below and thanks again for this tutorial to abduzeedo.