Step 13: Add An "Inner Glow" Layer Style

We've added an outer glow layer style to our light streak. Now let's add an inner glow style. With the Layer Style dialog box still open, click on the words Inner Glow on the left of the dialog box, directly below "Outer Glow":

You'll see the Inner Glow options appear in the middle column of the dialog box. Once again change the Blend Mode option at the top to Linear Light. Then click on the color swatch below the word "Noise" and either choose a color from the Color Picker or, as I did with the outer glow, sample a color directly from the image. I'm going to sample a darker area of the woman's skin for my inner glow color:

Once you've chosen the color for your inner glow, click OK to exit out of the Color Picker. Finally, increase the Size of your inner glow to around 10 pixels. As with the outer glow, you may need to play around with this value a bit depending on the size and resolution of your image:

Click OK when you're done to exit out of the Layer Style dialog box. Your light streak should now have an intense glow to it:

That thin dark line we're seeing through the middle of our light streak is the path. Don't worry, it won't be there when we're done.

Step 14: Edit The Path To Create A Slight Variation Of It

Let's make our light streak a bit more interesting by adding a couple more streaks to it. We can do that easily by simply editing our path to create some slight variations of it and then stroking each variation with our brush. Switch back to your Paths palette so we can edit our path. Then, hold down your Ctrl (Win) / Command (Mac) key and move your mouse cursor directly over any part of the path. As soon as it's over the path, you'll see the cursor turn into a white pointer, which means you now have temporary access to Photoshop's Direct Selection Tool, which is the tool we need to edit our path:

Click on the path with the Direct Selection Tool to select it, then make some minor adjustments to the path to create a slightly different path. You can drag an anchor point to a slightly different spot, or move direction handles to adjust the curves of the path, or even drag a path segment to a slightly different position. Just don't touch the anchor points at either end of the path because we want each variation we create to begin and end at the exact same spot. So other than those two anchor points, the rest of the path can be edited any way you like. We're not looking for major changes to the path. Small, subtle changes are all we need.

Here, I've changed the two main curves of my path slightly by dragging the two direction handles extending out from my middle anchor point. You can see how the curves of the path no longer exactly match the curve of the first light streak:

We can now stroke this variation of the path with our brush. But before we do, we'll probably want to use a slightly smaller brush this time, so press the left bracket key on your keyboard a couple of times to make the brush a bit smaller.

To stroke the variation of our path, there's no need to go through the hassle of selecting "Stroke Path" from the Paths palette's fly-out menu like we did last time. Simply click on the Stroke Path icon at the bottom of the Paths palette:

Photoshop strokes the new path we created with our brush. Since we're still working on the same layer in the Layers palette, the Outer Glow and Inner Glow layer styles are automatically applied to our new light streak: