Creating a Sunburst Effect In Photoshop
Sunburst effects have been around for a while. They are used to call attention to a subject and create a key area of focus. You can also use them to create a sense of action. There are many different methods to creating a sunburst effect in Photoshop. The following method is a little unorthodox, but it is effective and easy to do.
First, select a foreground and background color that you want your 2 colors to be for the sunburst. Then, Select the gradient tool and make sure that you have it set to linear gradient, and that the foreground to background gradient is selected. Then, simply click and drag vertically to create a vertical linear gradient.
From here, this is where the magic happens. Instead of drawing all of the lines out, go to Filter>Distort>Wave. The settings here will give you some really cool results if you play around with them, but for our purposes, we are going to create a square type wave, and depending on how many bursts that you would like, and their thickness, you need to pump up the value of the wavelength setting to get thicker vertical stripes, lower for thinner ones. Amplitude needs to be set high, so that we have just plain stripes, if it is set too low, then the gradient will still show, but if you are looking for that, then leave it low. The min needs to be lower than the max by about 100. Then, click ok, and you will have perfect vertical stripes.
Next, go to Filter>Distort>Polar Coordinates and set it to Rectangular to Polar. To add a little more, you can find a grunge texture and drop it into the document in a new layer, and set the blend mode to multiply.
Once you have created your sunburst effect, you can add texture to it by finding a texture image on the web. Bring it in and place it on its own layer. Then, simply change the blend mode to Overlay. You can use this as a background for a high impact image or advertisement.
