This tutorial will create the legendary Kamehameha / Energy ball effect.
Here’s our starting image.
Our first step is to make a new layer (Ctrl + Shift + N). Now we create a soft white brush dot. Choose the brush tool, and in the toolbar change your brush to be around 350px with 0% hardness. Click and make a dot in the center of the hands.
Now duplicate the ball (right click its layer, Duplicate Layer…). With the new layer, take the smudge tool (R) with a soft brush of about 40px and make circular-ish motions, having most of them converge towards the top. You might wish to decrease this layer’s opacity to around 75%.
Next, another new layer (Ctrl + Shift + N). Make two or three more dots, these of differing sizes but all much smaller than the big ball. Take the smudge tool (this time with a smaller brush size) to these also and mess them up so that the smudges of each ball kind of mix together.
From here, you can stop. I like to mess around with the color of the energy, however. Go to the layer menu heading, choose New Adjustment Layer, and choose Color Balance… Using these settings, you can hit just about any shade you’d like.
