Turn on the lights
I see that many people use lighting layers for icons and figured that some of you might like to see just how to create this effect yourself. If you’re interested in just making icons then you can ignore this. If you’d like to know more
1. Create a new 100x100 dpi file and fill the background with black.
2. Go through your standard brushes and find a shape for your lights. For this I used a diamond shape but you could try anything.
3. Make a new layer. Size your brush so it’s fairly small. Choose a color (I picked red) and click a few spots on the new layer.
4. Duplicate the layer with the red lights.
5. Make the lower red spotted layer active. Run a motion blur. Adjust it till you get a reasonable streaking.
6. Make a duplicate of the motion blurred layer.
. Merge the two blurred layers. Make sure you don’t disturb the top red light layer.7. Run the motion blur again with the same settings as before.
8. Select the eraser tool and CAREFULLY erase the blur on the right side. Make sure you erase the blur that exists under the top red light.
9. Turn off the two red light layers.
10. Create a new layer above the red light layers
11. Select a second color (I picked yellow).
12. Repeat steps 4 through 8 with the yellow lighted layer.
13. Turn on all your layers and you end up with something like this:
14. Create a new layer above your black background.
15. switch to your first color.
16. Click a red brushes on the new layer.
17. Add some noise to this layer.
18. and get this:
19. Run a Gaussian blur on the red dots. [note: I forgot to screen capture the blurring of the red dots.]
20. Create a new layer above the current red blurred layer.
21. Duplicate the process with your second color.
22. Run a Gaussian blur on the red and yellow fuzzy layers until you get what you like.
23. Save the layered file in case you want to change anything later.
24. Flatten the file.
25. Run a Gaussian blur
26. and get this:
Addendum: And an example, placing the image over a picture and changing it to Hard Light gives you: