Bored of the normal glow that is provided by the blending options in Photoshop, or feel more creative? Then don't let it restrict you, this technique demonstrates an alternate way of creating a glow around objects and text.
Whilst designing some seasonal masts the other day for my site I was using a technique for creating a different sort of glow than what is given from the Blending Options on the layer palette. Using this alternate technique the colours around the object are not uniform - they instead represent the image and provide a sort of mystical glow to the object or text.
Now for the purpose of this tutorial I visited the Stock Exchange resource for stock photographs and picked a random image that had a subject in it. Once you've copied the image into Photoshop, or Photoshop Elements, duplicate the layer so that there are two identical layers. Once you have done this, change the blending mode to "Screen".
As you can see the image is already a lot brighter, but thats not quite done. The next step is to create it's glow. To do this goto the Filter menu, then Blur, and pick "Gausian Blur". Then apply this with a radius of somewhere between 10 to 20 pixels.
Now that there is the gaussian blur applied it is starting to look as you might expect, but it might appear a little too bright and washed out. The solutiuon to this is to reduce the opacity to somewhere between 70-90% so that the original unaltered layer shows through from underneath.
And there you have it, a surreal glow on an image.
