4.2 How to Create Glow Effects for the Neon Light Sign

Hi everyone and welcome back to the Rainy Window Effect Course. In this lesson we'll learn how to create some glow effects and flickering lights for our neon sign. And now that we have the neon light tubes complete let's go ahead and create the lights when it's switched on. So in order to do this, we wanted to duplicate this Sign layer here, so select this press Ctrl+D on the keyboard to duplicate this. And in the Duplicate layer we want to turn off or let's go ahead and delete the Drop Shadow Effects. So let's go ahead and remove the Drop Shadow Effects. So, select let's that and press Delete and we also want to remove the Fill as well. So select the Fill and delete that as well. Cool. So now, we've got our colors back on let's go ahead and add a blur effect to this. So go to Effect, Blur and Sharpen and choose Gaussian Blur. Now, with the Gaussian Blur effects we want to change the blurriness settings to about, let's see what that looks like, so let's change this to about 8. In fact, let's crank this up to 80 as we want to have this as our background blur so this is where the light is sort of radiating out of our tubes. And let's introduce the color back in here, so go to Effect, Generate and Fill and we want to use the Eyedropper tool to select our Orange again, cool. Now let's go ahead and collapse that. We want to duplicate this layer again here so Ctrl+D to duplicate that again. And let's go ahead and remove the Blur and Fill effects, so select those both and press Delete on the keyboard. And now let's go ahead to the Bell and Emboss Layer Style here, Open this up. And we want to change the Highlight Opacity all the way down to 0, and change the Shadow Opacity here to about 35%. Right, so now we want to add the main glow effect for our neon lights. So to do this go to Effects and now let's go to Stylize and now let's find Glow. And this will add a nice glow on top of what we have here. And we want to go ahead into our Glow options here, and we want to make the Threshold and increase this to about 90%, and we want the Glow Radius to be 20, like so. Cool, now, we have a nice neon light text effect here the next thing we want to do is to create the background light. So now let's go ahead and collapse all of these and let's go back into the Sign layer. So double click on Sign here so we can go back into our text. And from here let's go ahead and select a New Solid. So let's create a New Solid here, Layer New and Solid. And with this here let's go ahead and call this Background Lights, And select OK. And the next thing we want to do is create the background lights. So, let's add the four color gradient by going to Effect and go to Generate and choose Four Color Gradient. And now let's go ahead and bring this layer to the bottom here. And let's go ahead and change the colors here as well. So let's change all the colors to the orange of our lights. So just using the Eyedropper tool to pick out the orange that we used for our text. And now let's change the Blending Mode here from Normal, and let's find Vivid Lights, like so. Great, now let's go ahead and decrease the Opacity here to something like 10. And now let's go ahead and select a mask by using the Rounded Rectangle tool. So let's selects the Rounded Rectangle tool here, And lets create a Mask, like so. And inside the Mask properties here we can increase the Feather value, so let's go ahead and increase the Feather value. Now because it's a little bit too dark the opacity, let's increase the Opacity here, so we can see what we're doing and increase the Feather up a little bit like so, to about 180. And now let's decrease the Opacity again to about 15. Cool. Now let's go ahead and go back into our background to see what that looks like, and you'll see now that we've got this nice glow effect for our text. In fact, it's a little bit too far down, so let's go ahead and change the where it's placed. So, let's bring this up little bit like so. And there you go, so now it's up a little bit more. In fact, we want to bring the Opacity down just slightly, so just bring it back down to 10 just to make it a little bit more subtle. Excellent, so now we have a really nice background glow effect. Now let's go ahead and create the animation for our lights flickering on. So first, let's go back to our top layer here, so this is our Lights on Layer. Now with the top layer selected here go ahead and press the T button on your keyboard to bring up the Opacity settings. And let's go ahead and Scrub the Timeline all the way to the beginning. And we want to bring the Opacity settings all the way down to 0% and then hit the Keyframe button over here to create a keyframe. Now, let's go ahead and select the Keyframe here, hold Alt+Ctrl on the keyboard and then click on the Keyframe to create a New Hold Keyframe. And now let's go ahead and zoom into the timeline here just so that we can see exactly what we're doing. And let's go one frame forward by hitting the Page Down button on the keyboard. And now let's bring the Opacity up to 25%. And press Enter to create a new Keyframe. Press Page Down again to go forward one frame and bring the Opacity down to 10%. Press Enter to create a Keyframe. Go one frame forward again and now let's bring the Opacity up to 70%. And go one frame forwards bring it back down to 50%. One frame forwards again and finally bringing the Opacity up to 100%. Now let's go ahead and select all the Keyframes here, hold Alt on the keyboard and now we can spread the keyframes out a little bit like so. In fact, these keyframes might be a little bit too far apart so let's hold ALT again and bring these keyframes back in, Just a little bit more. And then hitting the Preview button to see what our flickering animation looks like, cool. So now that we've got our flickering lights animation working we still need to add these keyframes to the rest of the layers here as well. So let's go ahead and select all of the Keyframes again here, press control C to copy. Make sure that we're at the very beginning of our Timeline and let's go ahead and select just this top, this middle layer here. Press Ctrl+V on the keyboard to paste. We don't wanna paste the keyframes on to this layer because this is just our empty neon light tubes here. So now we've got both the keyframes on both of these layers. So now are both of our light layers will have the neon light flickering animation, excellent. Now if you wanted to change the text of your animation at any point all you have to do here is open up the Sign Comp. And in this composition here you can see that we can change the text to anything that we want. So we can change it to something like NEON LIGHTS. And when we go back to our Background layer you'll find that the text automatically changes like so, excellent. So that's it for this lesson. In the next lesson that we'll learn how to create a focus blur animation. See you all there