OK, OK.  I know the neon light effect has been done a million times before in everything from CorelDraw! to Illustrator to PaintShop Pro to PhotoShop, but bear with me here for a minute, because this one has a few little unique twists to it.  If you stare at this one long enough, you can almost hear it buzzing with electricity, and, you may even find yourself squinting a bit.  Also, One of the cool things about this one is that it creates kind of a three dimensional looking neon light, in sort of a plastic looking housing with lots of subtle detail, that ends up on it's own layer.  So, with a little help from lighting effects, you can drag it and hang on any virtual wall in one of your other PhotoShop documents.  You will see one that I did later in this article.  If you want to see the full size version, click on the reduced version above.  The full size version will take a minute to load, but, you will see a lot of the details that are lost by reducing the image for the Web.

This one relies heavily on Curves with a bit of Image Calculations.  If your not using these very often, they are well worth the experimentation.  There are some great advanced PhotoShop books available that cover these topics and other advanced features of PhotoShop in great depth.  Email us if your looking for some titles.  As far as filters go, only a couple are used here.  Good old Guassian Blur for one, and Solarize.  Be sure to examine how they were used together.  It's a very handing little technique that I'm sure you will find many other interesting uses for.

I also used Layer Effects on this one.  Layer Effects are really great if used the right way.  You get a nice real time preview as you adjust the settings.  If over used, however, Layer Effects can produce the the same old, cliché, cheesy looking effects that you see in a lot of the 'One Push of the Button' filters for PhotoShop.  Look around the Web a lot, and you will see what I mean.  There are a lot of pages out there with the same old beveled text effects and drop shadows that you get from filters like Eye Candy, Kia's Power Tools, Layer Effects, etc.  These are all great tools, but they should be used to enhance your own style rather than become your style.  Nothing beats rolling up your sleeves and taking the time to produce these effects on your own.  You get a great understanding of how all this stuff works, and you develop a feel for tweaking your final images to get just the right effect for the right situation.  What you end up with, is a style that is all your own.  When the Web first started to take off back in about '95 - '96, and PhotoShop started becoming a household application, every Web page looked the same.  They all had gray backgrounds, embossed with the company's logo, and had 3D buttons made with Alien Skin's Outer Bevel filter with a drop shadow that made them look as if they were floating four feet off the page.  It looked like you needed two hands to push these babies in!  (I know..., I did some of them.)  It's not that these quick fix filters are bad, it's just just that they're output is very generic and the result becomes stale and cliché, very quickly.

If you need quick fixes, record your own personal effects to actions and then apply them as needed.  Man!  The combination of Actions and the History Palette has got to be the greatest creation since the invention of PhotoShop itself.  When you are sitting at your computer playing around in PhotoShop, RECORD EVERYTHING YOU DO TO AN ACTION!!!  When your results get out of hand, you can always stop recording, delete steps, go back to previous states and start recording again where you left off.  But get it recorded!  I can't tell you how many times, after hours of experimentation, that I have sat back and looked looked at a final image and thought, "Awesome!!  This is a Sweet Effect!  Too bad it's a picture of the word 'TEST' and I couldn't recreated it if my stinkin' life depended on it."   Well, thanks to actions, NO MORE!!!

Anyway, where the hell were we?  Oh yeah, The Electric Light Action.  Download it here and load it into your Actions Palette.  You will want to start with a new 8x5 inch document with some decent sized text on it.  Anything too small and you will loose detail.  For this one, I used Jokerman at about 200 points.  I tweaked it a bit in Illustrator and brought it into back into PhotoShop for the final effect.  My original, shown here reduced for the Web, was actually 8x8 inches.  If you want, you can click on it and download a full size copy to try this out on.

When you get this technique down, make sure and try it with different colors.  I have found that different colors seem to all need they're own tweaking to get the right effect.  Blue seems to be the easiest.  That's why I did the action in blue.

Try putting the final light object on a new background.  On this one, I started with a brick wall pattern, darkened it with Curves and lit it up with Lighting Effects.  I placed the lights over the wall and stamped everything to a new layer.(put a new layer on top, highlight the new layer, link the other layers you want to combine and hold down the alt/option key while selecting Layers>Merge Linked)  I then applied lighting effects to that layer because it gave me a reference as to where to put the lights.  After applying the effect, I deleted the new layer, selected the brick wall layer and applied the filter again.(alt/option+F)  I do that quite a bit when I need to apply a filter to one layer where I need other layers as a reference.  Only the layer you are applying the filter to, shows up in the preview window.  I have included some close ups so that you can see some of the detail that is lost by resizing the image down for the Web.  You can also click on the reduced version above to view the 400kb original. 

As always, Email Us with any incarnations or variations you may come up with on your own.  There are usually many different ways to achieve the same results.  The trick is to develop your skills to the the point where you recognize the result of a particular step as something you already know how to do.  And maybe, even know how to do it better and quicker.  In fact, if you do, tell me!  Also, take a minute to sign our guest book and let us know what you think of these. I hope that you are are finding them useful.  Have Fun!!