How to make your own Sparkle

Here is a quick tutorial on how to make your own sparkle! You will need to be familiar with the pen tool, paint brush dynamics and layer opacity.

 Start with a new file, black background and second layer.

 Select the elliptical marquee tool, and create a long oval.

Paint bucket in the oval white, and deselect.

Add a motion blur to your oval at a 90 degree angle and up to around 1000 or so.

 Then add a gaussian blur around 25-30.

Duplicate the layer and rotate it 90 degrees.

It should look like this :)

Next step: create a new layer. Then go to your brush, select a 14 px brush at 0 hardness and shape dynamics set to pen pressure.

Select your pen tool. Set one anchor point at the top of your sparkle, and one at the end to make a straight line.

Right click and select stroke path.

Set to brush and check simulate pressure.

Again, duplicate, and rotate 90 degrees. Now you are going to want to merge your first two sparkle lines (the ones you blurred) into one layer and reduce the opacity by half.

Make another new layer. Select your brush tool, bringing the size up around 400-500, 0 hardness. And make a dot in the center of your sparkle. You can adjust opacity as you like.

 Merge your pen tool line layers together. Duplicate, and then rotate and reduce in size to get the smaller sparkle lines in the center. Reduce their opacity to between 50-60%

Lastly, if you want, again, make a new layer. Select the brush tool, reduce and make the size between 1000 and 1200. Make a dot in the middle, and bring the opacity down significantly. And this is what you should end up with :) Then you can merge all of the layers together and save as a psd file, or flatten your image and just use it with the screen blend. Don't be afraid to mess around and change up the opacity, length and size of the sparkle lines to get a unique look :)