Great balls of (blue)fire!

[GothamCity]

Hey guys!
This is my first time actually posting a picture and a before and after so hopefully I do this right!

Before


After


Steps
All of this was done in CS3, taken with a Canon Rebel with a kit lens, my friend was running around making goofy poses around campus asking for pictures and I figured this one was perfect for a tutorial I found.

1. I desaturated the picture and raised the contrast a very tiny bit via Brightness/Contrast
and the Saturation slider
2. I burned the wrinkles in his t-shirt and jeans a bit, the white was really overwhelming when I added the orb.
3. Added a new gradient layer using a custom made blue gradient just picking random blues going darkest to lighest, adjusted the layer opacity to how I liked it, and I believe it was set to soft light, I also erased some bits with the eraser set around 20% opacity to get some more of the ground.
4. Added a black to transparent gradient to darken up the side with the shirt, it took a lot of playing around to make it not so blinding.
5. Added the glowing ball off fire/orb/whatever after following this pretty fun and easy tutorial from Aaron Nace Photography which can be found HERE
6. As the tutorial linked above says, I added another layer set at the COLOR mode to add some blue lighting along his arms, shirt, and under chin to make it appear as if the ball was giving off light.

Some of these steps aren't exact, it was a lot of playing around and adjusting to get it how I wanted, and there's a bit of a smudge from the lens that I didn't fix but hopefully this is understandable =]

[photofun]

Very cool effect...I will have to try that sometime! Thanks for the steps and great idea.

[foxor]

Awesome job!!! The lighting that you created looks really good, in my opinion.

[jagoble25]

Man that's a pretty cool pic, thanks for sharing!

[geekgirl415]

That's really cool!!!

[GothamCity]

Thanks guys! It was a lot of fun to do =] Hopefully I can try out some other colors soon

[lyacadajar]

looks like a lot of fun to try. thanks for sharing!