OxCreative

Bokeh Effect / Particle Effect Tutorial in Adobe Photoshop CS3 or CS4

It’s been a while since we’ve created a tutorial so here’s a quick Photoshop tutorial which you can do if you have Photoshop CS or higher to create a Bokeh/Particle effect – it’s similar to the blood effect tutorial we created some time ago.

Step 1

Open a new Photoshop document and set the background colour to black. We used a 1000px X 1000px document.
Create a new layer and from the brushes panel select a soft round brush – we used the 45 pixel brush (see below).

Step 2

In the brush editor, select ‘shape dynamics’ and set ‘size jitter’ to 100%. Next, select ‘Scattering’ and set scatter to 1000% and check the box for ‘Both Axes’. Set ‘count jitter’ to 86% and check the boxes for ‘wet edges’ and ‘smoothing’ on the left.

Step 3

Draw a line or curve on the new layer you created in Step 1. You should get an effect like the one below:

Step 4

Double click on the layer to bring up the effects palette. Select ‘Gradient Overlay’ and in the gradient dropdown, select your desired gradient.

Result

You should be left with a particle or bokeh effect which you can use a background. Try tweaking the opacity, applying a Gaussian blur or increasing the brush size to achieve different effects!