Trendy Rings in Photoshop


In this tutorial, I'll show you how to make some cool rings you see in abstracts/light beams alot.

1. Open up Photoshop, make a new document, and make your canvas all black.

2. Make a new layer, grab your Elliptical Marquee tool and draw a circle while holding shift (shift makes perfect circles )


3. Press 'D' and then 'X' to set your foreground to white, and your background to black. Then go to Edit > Stroke, and use these settings:


You should now have something like this:


4. Now lower the layer's opacity to about 40%, and then press Ctrl+T (transform). The near the top there should be some input boxes that say W: 100% and H: 100%. Change H: from 100% to 35%.


5. Your ring should be kinda short now. These look pretty good on beams, long parts of renders, etc. This is what I got after sticking it on a beam, and adding some small detail:



EXTRA Steps: This ring look a little plain, huh? Well heres a trick to spice it up.

1. Make a new document (pretty large, you can always scale it down), and make your convas all black.

2. Make a new layer. Now, select your rectangular marquee tool, and make some random rectangles.

3. Now select parts of your rectangles with your marquee tool, and hit delete.

4. Keep doing this for a while, and keep adding more and more detail. This is what I got after a while:


5. Then go to Filter > Distort > Polar Coordinates, and select Rectangular to Polar, and hit Ok. Heres my result: