Add a Magical Glow to Your Procreate Art

In this video tutorial, I share one of my all-time favorite techniques for elevating photos or art images.

What You’ll Need to Follow Along

We’re crafting this fiery design using the iPad app Procreate – so here’s what you’ll need to follow along:

NOTE: This technique will generally work in any photo editing application like Photoshop or Affinity Photo, so you can also follow along using your favorite photo editing program for the first two approaches I share (the last one is a specific effect in Procreate)

Background

If you asked me what my all-time favorite tips or tricks for working with images are – the one I’m sharing today would easily be in the top five. 

You know that feeling where some artists’ work totally blows your mind, but you just can’t figure out what on earth they’re doing to get a certain look? Even more confounding – sometimes you almost sense there’s something there, but you don’t know the right words to use to approach solving the mystery? 

This effect was one of those situations for me, and it took eight years before I finally discovered what the secret was (and, to my great surprise – how simple it is to apply)…

There’s a couple of curveballs in this story, but before we get to those, I really encourage you to actually try this one out yourself to see what you think – it can be really subtle (like the first version I show in the video), which is why I tended to exaggerate it more later in the tutorial 😀)

Back to the origin story of discovering this technique and the first curveball—it’s an effect that I found in my years of learning about photography, not calligraphy…

After building an interest in photography for a few years, I decided to take it more seriously in 2006 and invested in my first ever DSLR – the Canon Digital Rebel XTi, and try to learn everything I can find to understand the basics and refine my skills.

(This was before YouTube became the valuable resource it is today, and there wasn’t as much information available online (at least that I knew of at the time), so most of what I learned came from books and practice)

I’d take my camera with me everywhere, ultimately getting to the point where I’d plan entire trips just around photography, but no matter how much I researched or practiced, I just couldn’t get my photos to look like the images I most admired. 

I was totally baffled. 

It took a full eight years before I finally found a tutorial that unlocked one of the biggest mysteries, and that’s the effect I share in the video. 

As it turns out, the effect was originally developed in the 80s and is called the “Orton Effect.” I originally learned how to do it in Photoshop, but in the video above, I share three ways to do it entirely in Procreate.

And here’s the best part (which is also curveball two) – it’s not limited to photography. 

You can apply the technique to any art you make – whether it’s a photo of your hand-made art or your library of digital art in Procreate (or wherever you make digital art).

Like I mentioned, it can be really subtle (which is what made it so incredibly difficult to discover), or you can push it to make it more pronounced.

Process

Check out the video for the full, step-by-step walkthrough for creating this magical glow effect, but here’s a summary.

The one key to figuring out how to replicate this effect in Procreate was finding the “Copy All” and “Paste” options. This is the easiest way to create a merged, pixel duplicate of your art in Procreate, and you can add lots of fun effects with this base technique that you can access with a three-finger downward swipe on the canvas.

So the first step in each of the three versions of the effect is to create a merged duplicate layer of your art.

Here’s a summary of the three versions we walk through in the video:

  • Basic Version: This is the easiest version of the effect that uses just one, blurred layer of the original art.
  • Boosted Version: In this version, we boost the impact of the effect by adding some contrast to the blurred layer.
  • Bloom Version: In this final version, we use one of the built-in adjustments in Procreate called the “Bloom” effect.

Note: This post and the photos within it may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the link, I may receive a commission at no extra charge to you.

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