Written By Steve Patterson

In this Photoshop tutorial, we'll learn how to create a high key glow effect, which is a fancy way of saying we'll be applying a glow only to the highlights in an image. This effect works especially well with wedding portraits since it's great for adding a romantic, magical look to your photos, and wedding portraits usually contain lots of bright white areas to work with. We'll see how to easily select just the highlights in an image using Photoshop's Color Range command, then we'll copy the highlights to their own layer and create the glow effect using a blur filter and one of Photoshop's layer blend modes designed for lightening images. Finally, we'll combine layers into a layer group and use a layer mask to limit the areas where the glow effect is visibile. It may sound like a lot of work, but once you know how to do it, the entire effect can be completed in just a few minutes! I'm using Photoshop CS4 here, but any recent version of Photoshop will work.

Here's the image I'll be using for this tutorial:

Here's how it will look after adding our high key glow effect:

Not what you're looking for? Check out our other Photo Effects tutorials!

Want an easier way to follow along with our tutorials? Download them as printable PDFs!

Let's get started!

Step 1: Select The Highlights With The Color Range Command

With our image newly opened in Photoshop, our first step is to select only the highlights (the brightest areas) in the image. Photoshop gives us an easy way to select the highlights using the Color Range command, which, like the Magic Wand tool, allows us to select a range of colors or brightness values in an image, although the Color Range command is much more powerful. Go up to the Select menu in the Menu Bar at the top of the screen and choose Color Range:

When the Color Range dialog box appears, simply select Highlights from the Select drop-down list at the top of the dialog box:

Click OK to exit out of the dialog box, and if we look at the image in the document window, we can now see selection outlines appearing around all the highlight areas:

Step 2: Copy The Highlights To A New Layer

With the highlights selected, go up to the Layer menu in the Menu Bar, choose New, and then choose Layer via Copy:

You can also press the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac) which is a much faster way to copy a layer. Normally, this would create a copy of the entire layer, but any time we have something on the layer selected, only the area inside the selection is copied. In this case, we have the highlights selected, so only the highlights are copied to the new layer.

It won't look like anything has happened yet in the document window, but if we look in the Layers panel (panels are called "palettes" in earlier versions of Photoshop), we can see that we now have a new layer named "Layer 1" sitting above the Background layer, which is the layer that contains our original image. And if we look in the preview thumbnail to the left of the layer's name, we can see that the layer contains only the highlights from the image. The gray and white checkerboard pattern that fills up the rest of the thumbnail indicates transparency, which means that those areas on the layer are blank:

If you want a better view of exactly what's on "Layer 1", click on the Layer Visibility icon (the eyeball) on the left of the Background layer in the Layers panel:

This will temporarily hide the original image on the Background layer from view, allowing us to see only the highlights on "Layer 1", along with the checkerboard pattern showing us the areas on the layer that are blank:

Click once again on the Layer Visibility icon for the Background layer to turn it back on. We'll now use the highlights to create our glow effect!

Still scrolling through web pages? Download our Photoshop tutorials as print-ready PDFs!

Go to page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4