In this video tutorial we’ll be mixing photo editing and graphic art to create our own starburst lens flare effects and appling them to an image. You don’t really need any sort of graphic skills to do this as the process mainly involves manipulation through scaling, rotating and applying filters. The whole tutorial can be completed on Adobe Photoshop CS3 and onward.

The above is an example of the sort of texture we’ll be creating and inserting into a final image. 

Some of the tools/techniques that we will be using include:

  • Layer blend modes
  • Levels adjustments for texture layers
  • Transforming and selecting with constraints and reference points
  • Warp tool
  • Blur and sharpening tools like radial blur, Gaussian blur and unsharp mask.
  • Color manipulation with hue/saturation

As promised, three sample starbursts are provided for you to download and you are free to use them wherever you like. Just insert them into your image, scale them appropriately and change the blend mode to “screen” as shown in the tutorial.
Starburst 1, Starburst 2, Starburst 3

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