How To Create An “Illustrator Sunrise” In Photoshop

This is a technique DTP editor Elisabetta Bruno asked me about some time ago. I figured it’s time to finally show the secret!

The “Illustrator sunrise” is my term for those Illustrator graphics where there’s usually a mountain or rolling hills in the foreground and the rays of the sun streaming all around it, moving outward from a central point in the center of the graphic (behind the mountain or hills). The last tutorial that comes to mind about it is Matt Kloskowski’s “Lighting Effects and Opacity Masks” tutorial from the September/October issue of Layers Magazine. It’s the type of thing Illustrator can do very well because you can use the Transform effect to build a sun’s rays very quickly. Photoshop also has a filter that can do something very similar, and can do it about as quickly as Illustrator (though it takes more time to set up).

Step 1: Create a new file (File –> New… or Cmd/Ctrl-N).

Step 2: Fill the background with a blue color for the sky.

Step 3: Now it’s time to do a little math. Trust me, to get the rays right the first time you’ll want to crunch a couple numbers first. If “r” is the number of rays you would like to have and “w” is the width of your image, then figure up this quick equation:

w / 2r = ??

Your answer is the width of the rectangular marquee that you should now draw on the left edge of the image and fill with the color of your sun’s rays (I’m going to do a yellow-to-orange gradient). Note that if you use a gradient, it’s the color on the bottom of the image that will end up on the far ends of your rays.

Look at Figure 1 below. My image is 330 pixels wide and I want eleven rays, so the width of my selection is 15 pixels, which I have filled with my gradient.

Figure 1: A plain sky and one lousy stripe…

Step 4: Make a selection that is double the width of your previous selection minus one pixel (in my case, 29 pixels) and choose Define Pattern… from the Edit menu. Click OK to save the selected region (one ray and one equally-sized piece of sky) as a pattern.

By creating this pattern, we are going to save ourselves a lot of work in the next step:

Step 5: Select all of the image (Select –> All, or Cmd/Ctrl-A) and choose Edit –> Fill and fill the image with your pattern. If you do like busy work, you can make selection after selection and fill each one with your gradient. By making a single ray into a pattern and then filling the image with that pattern, we have saved ourselves a lot of time and effort. You can see my results in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Just a bunch of stripes. Doesn’t look like a sunrise to me!

Quick tip: You can resize your marquee exactly by using Select –> Transform Selection. Many users know the options bar allows them to resize a selection by percentages, but most don’t know that you can also type in pixel amounts and resize selections as you want. You can even position them at exact pixel locations. The downside (and I can’t explain why) is that once you transform a selection in this way it cannot be used to define a pattern. So for this How-To, this tip works great for making that first selection but for the second (the one you will use to define the pattern) it doesn’t help.

Note: I subtracted a pixel in my calculations for Step 5 because otherwise it seems the pattern is one pixel too large and you end up with only a piece of the sky on the right edge of the image.

Step 6: After all that work to set up the perfect image, now we’ll use a single filter to completely transform this striped image into a true “Illustrator sunrise.” Use Filter –> Distort –> Polar Coordinates! You’ll immediately see the sunrise image in the Polar Coordinates preview. If you’re really looking for a neat new effect, select “Polar to Rectangular” and watch Photoshop do some unpredictable things with your image.

Figure 3: Cool—Polar Coordinates puts the whole darn image in a centrifuge!

Figure 3 shows the image after the Polar Coordinates filter is used, and Figure 4 includes a mountain range and a second sky layer on top of the sun—by adding a layer mask to that sky layer, I can brush in where I want the rays to show brightest.

Figure 4: The final image—Matt Kloskowski would be proud.

One final note about the Polar Coordinates filter: I think it’s one of the coolest filters in the entire Photoshop arsenal, and it’s worth playing around with. Its warping abilities are unique and using it on conventional images (see Figure 5) will create some unexpected results!

Figure 5: My own mug shot, after 20 hits with Polar Coordinates, looks like a psychedelic art experiment.