I recently did a Space Girl photoshoot with model Annabell Bella and thought I’d share a Photoshop technique that I used.

It was based on this YouTube video, but modified for my application.

Here’s the final product:

Here’s where I started:

I did all of my normal retouching on the model part off it, but then I wanted the ray guns to actually be shooting something.I wasn’t going for realistic, but rather a retro Sci Fi look like Flash Gordon or Barbarella, with a little Steampunk influence.

Create a New Layer. I tried to keep this as non-destructive as possible.
Select and configure the gradient tool – Open gradient config by clicking on the gradient in the top tool bar.
— Switch type to Noise
— Hit Randomize until you get a gradient with different tones.
— Click OK
Holding the shift key down and drag from top to bottom of the canvas. This will create a gradient with lots of horizontal lines of color.
Desaturate the whole layer. Cmd-Opt-U. Now all those lines are shades of gray.
Hit Cmd-T (Free Transform)
— Grab the top middle handle, hold the shift and options keys down and drag down.
— The gradient will compress into the center. Make it the widest size of the beam.
Using Free Transform, make it the length you need.
You can save after this as it is still horizontal. Just duplicate the layer and hide one of them. Now you can used this layer to do similar beams later.
Move the beam into place

Select Perspective, by control/right clicking while in Free Transform
— Move the corners at the barrel so they line up with 2 points on the gun.
— Narrow the other end of the beam
Select Warp, again by control/right clicking while in Free Transform
— Shape the barrel end to cover the circular opening of the barrel.
— Put a little curve/narrowing in the beam to look cool.
— Done with transform, click the check box

Duplicate your beam layer.
Double the side of your beam layer copy. Select Free Transform again and enter 200% in the H & W Fields

Blur the heck out of the big beam. Blur->Gaussian Blur at 100 px. The bigger beam with almost disappear.
This is your glow. It may not be exactly where you want it. Feel free to move it around to make it right.

Make a new layer.
Select the brush tool and pick a brush size about 2x your beam size.
Now pick three or four colors and just draw over sections of the big beam in your new layer. Move from the barrel to the end of the beam making little patches of color all the way down.

Now – with the color layer selected – do Gaussian Blur. 100 will probably work, but you can mess with it.

The beam glow may look a little weak. Try duplicating the layer so you have two color layers on top of each other. Try setting the new layer to Overlay or one of the other transfer modes to get some different color and intensities. You may need more than one layer to get the effect you want.

If you now have multiple color layers, you may want to collapse them into one.
Once you have the beam covered in colors, duplicate your color layer. Move your new color layer over the small beam layer.
You now have
color 1
big beam
color 2
small beam

Put your cursor on the line between the top two layers and hold down the option key. Click on the line and the color will be mask to the layer below it.
Repeat for the small beam.

Once your color layers are masked/attached to the beam layers, set their layer mode to Color. Now your lines are back in your beam.

You should now have a glowy beam.

This is just one way to do it and it may not be the look you are going for. Here’s some things you can mess with and tweek try to get a cool beam.
If the lines in the beam from the small beam are too distinct try doing a radial blur down the beam to get a better look.
Change the opacity of the blurred beam so it isn’t 100 percent. You can also change its size.

A friend and new model photographer called me the other day after shooting an event and wondered why his images looked soft. He’d shot with a number of different cameras and lenses, but his images still looked soft to him. While I diagnosed his problem I went through a few reasons this might be.

#1 Your Focus is Off

Of course the image couple be out of focus. Could be the auto-focus missed your model and focused on something else. This is kind of obvious and probably isn’t a problem you’d be asking about.

The subtler issue is how depth of field and aperture affect softness. If you are using a wide open aperture – a low number – you get a very narrow area that is in focus. In this case your image might look soft because not all of it is in focus.

#2 It Is Really Motion Blur

In these days of Photoshop, we often think motion blur is just an effect, but it is also what happens when your model, or your camera moves while the shutter is open. We also often miss this when looking at the back of the camera because that image is so small and low rez motion doesn’t show up. But if you zoom in you’ll see it.

Look at the eyes. Do you see more than one? Or a ghost image next to the other one? That’s motion blur.

Fix this by using a faster shutter speed. To avoid camera movement causing motion blur, the rule of thumb is your shutter speed should be higher than the length of your lens. And don’t forget the crop factor of non-full frame sensor.

For example, when I shoot with my 70-200 lens zoomed all the way in, my shutter should be at least 300. That lens happens to be a Nikon VR lens, so I don’t really have to be 300, but that’s the basic calculation.

#3 You Should Have Shot RAW

Friends don’t let friends shoot JPEG.

Given a lot of our images are going on the web, at some point we need to make a compressed image – normally this is JPEG. Compressing these images takes some processing power. You could do this compression on the little CPU in your camera, or you could do it on the multi-core desktop computer you use for post processing your images. Guess which one is better?

With RAW on most cameras you also get at least 14bits of data, and that gets cut down to 8bits of data in the JPEG. That’s data that is just gone.

In the end this was my friend’s problem: when he opened some images in Lightroom that had been shot RAW, they were as sharp as can be.

Digital images are naturally a little soft. As a matter of fact if you look at a RAW image Lightroom before you make any changes, it will already have some sharpening done to it because Adobe knows the image is softer than it should be. But in reality you shouldn’t notice this softness.

When you notice softness and you didn’t plan for it (for instance using a big light source) there is generally something wrong. Hopefully you can figure out what it is using these three criteria.