Before we begin, I'm gonna mention that you should probably know how to edit a picture and create artwork for this, because this is for making artwork. I'll also be using a picture from Maverick, which I edited a part of his thing.

Maverick:

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/profiles/76561199008809574

You just need photoshop, and your picture.
I'll be using Maverick's picture, this is what it looks like:

Sky bloom is most likely the easiest bloom to do, because it just requires you to color in a few spots.

For this, I like adding bloom at the end of a picture, so we'll be doing it after we've edited all of our layers and such, before making our lens blur. In the end, however, it doesn't matter when you've done it as long as it's after you've finished most of your picture.

Now that we have our picture ready to edit, we're going to create a new empty layer above it. Just for preferences, I like putting mine in a group.



Okay, so we've got our layer ready. Now we're going to get a brush set up, and we're going to want this brush to be as sharp and strong as possible.

So now that we've got our settings all set up, we need to make the color of the bloom. I'll be making two examples of how to this, with one being more in-depth and the second being a quick review. I'll start off with doing sky.


Sky bloom's color depends on the scene, and what you have for it. For Maverick's picture, we've got a light blue-ish color, so we'll be using a color like that. I've chosen this color.



Now we get to do the painting and drawing. We'll start painting on our empty layer that we made earlier, and we're going to start drawing in areas where the sky is. If it helps, you can use your sky mask for reference.







Okay, so we've got it drawn. Next step.

This part's super easy. We're going to go to Filter<Blur<Motion Blur.



So now that we've got it up, we're just going to go to set our distance to 200, and our angle to 0 degrees.



Press Ok.



Now go to Filter<Blur<Motion Blur again.



Set your distance to 200 again if it isn't already, and make your angle 90 degrees.



Press Ok.



Now we're going to go to set our layer to scren.

This is the shortest and easiest step. After we've motion blurred and set our layer to screen, it's going to look way too bright, like it does right now.



That's pretty ugly, so we're just going to edit the "Fill" and "Opacity" values down until it looks nice.



That looks better already.



There you go. You've created sky bloom. This is a before and after picture.



This is where you'd finish, but there's another form of creating bloom as well. It's very similar to this, except it just involves a little more work in painting. Highlight bloom.

Highlight bloom works a little differently from sky bloom, from the fact that it requires more work in drawing, but it can also look just as good.

This follows the same exact steps from before, following from steps 1 and 2. We'll continue on for the highlight version.

Unlike sky bloom, highlight bloom requires different colors, and we'll have to get them for specific things. We'll be painting different highlights around the picture, like these spots I've marked:



We'll be using three different colors, because we have three main parts that have highlights.


Uniform




Skin




Gun

Painting highlight bloom has the same brush settings from before when we were doing sky bloom, and make sure you're using the right color for the right layer. We'll be starting off with the uniforms.

This is our first area we'll begin with, just paint as you did with sky bloom, except this time, just paint and brush on the areas of the highlight.





Now do this with the rest of the picture for this color, where highlights are visible on the uniforms. I'll include the helmets in it too, because I don't want to make another color.






Now we have that out of the way, let's go onto the next one: skin.

Do the same as before, paint the highlights.







Don't forget the other one as well.





Now the next one, the guns.

Do it like before, again.







Do the other one as well.




Now we are finally finished painting those highlights.

Onto motion blurring.

Motion blur for highlights have the exact same process as sky bloom, just repeat the process but do it for each layer. I like doing all the angle 0 ones on all of them, then doing angle 90 ones after I do all the angle 0.

Do one angle of motion blur.



Do the other angle of motion blur.

We'll be just doing the same thing for sky bloom. Set all the layers to screen.




Now it should look something like this:



You're free to edit the values of the layers to what you want now. This is what it ended up looking like:

After a little more editing, this is what it looked like once finished:





man this guide was way too confusing for something so simple