This effect can be seen in lots of commercial photography and is really not THAT hard to do. It might be difficult for anyone who has little to no experience in Photoshop, but learning this technique will definitely teach you a lot about Photoshop. If you can learn to do this, you can learn to do lots of other things. So lets get started….
1. Initial Setup
First thing you need to do is choose a photo that you want to start with. I have this shot that I took of my nephew and it was just begging for this treatment, so I obliged. You can use this one if you want to for the tutorial, or pick any other photo you think will work well.
Now that you have your photo opened up in Photoshop, the very first thing you need to do, and should ALWAYS do when “Photo-shopping”, is make a duplicate of the “background” layer. Do that by pressing CTL+J. Great. Your layers pallet should look like this now:
2. Draw your first path
Now its time to get straight into it. Your going to need the Pen tool for this, so get it out. It looks like this: 
or you can press “P” (for Pen) to equip the tool. Start by clicking down on one of the pieces of chalk (or wherever you want your light ribbon to originate from) and then click again, and again, and again to create an “s-curve” looking line…Hard to explain but just look at the pictures below.
This could take some practice, the Pen tool is often overlooked by beginners,but is a totally required tool of Photoshop, so if you are stuck here, PRACTICE with it. I may write a tutorial soon specifically for the pen tool…but Google it if you need help right now.
4. Paint the path
Okay so now that we have the line drawn, we need to apply a stroke to it. Bur first we need to do three things. First, make sure you SAVE THAT PATH, this is important and should be a regular practice so get in this habit, go to your layers pallet and click on the “Paths” tab. Double click on the path(line) you just drew, and give it a name. That will save the path and this way when you start to draw a new one, it will start a new path rather than overwriting the one you just did.
Second, we need to set our paintbrush, since that is the tool we will be calling on to apply the stroke to our path. To do this, get your brush tool out 
(Press the “B” key) and right click on the image somewhere. You should get this menu:
I used a diameter of 40px. This will determine the width of the light ribbon, so use what you think will work well. the actual pixel setting will depend heavily on the size of your image. I mean think about it, if you make a 40px line in a 50px image, well then your covering almost the whole image! But my image is 3000px wide so 40 is not that much right? its all relative so play around and if you dont like the sise you chose,, CTL+Z and try again. I also used a hardness of 0, again do what you like. Also you should set the color, double click the foreground color and set it to whatever you want. In this case I am using blue since the chalk that this ribbon is originating at is also blue.
The third and final thing we need to do before stroking this path, is to create a layer specifically for this ribbon to live on. Go back to the layers pallet, and click the little post-it note looking button to create a new layer, or press Shift+CTL+N. Your layers should look like this:
Now go back to the path’s pallet and right-click on your path and click “Stroke Path” (if you have the pen tool out, you could also right-click anywhere on the image to get the same menu, you just have to make sure the path you want to stroke is selected in the paths pallet) doing it from the paths pallet itself, ensures you will stroke the right path, which becomes important when you have more than one 
You will get the following menu, make sure its set to “brush” and you have the simulate pressure box checked (you don’t have to, what this does is give it a more realistic “brush stroke” look. If you leave it unchecked, the line will be more uniform and straight. Just try it.)
Okay if your still with me you should have this now (de-select your path so you can see your results in full glory):
5. Edit the Path
Okay, now that we have the first ribbon drawn, we need to clip parts of it out so that it looks like its wrapping around our little guy here. There are a few ways to do this, but to keep things easy, lets just use the eraser tool for now. So grab it, by pressing “E”. You probably want a fairly hard eraser (right click and set the hardness to 90ish)
Now on the areas where you want the ribbon to be “behind” our guy here, or whatever your subject is, erase the ribbon. I took it out where it crosses his legs and his head, leaving it in front of his body…
6. Finish the Ribbon
Ok. Its time to add some pizzazz to the ribbon itself. Duplicate the ribbon layer by selecting it and pressing CTL+J. Now select the first ribbon layer, the one that’s now below the other.
Now apply a Gaussian Blur to that layer by clicking “Filter” from the menu and then “Gaussian Blur”. Move the slider around until you like the look.
Then Duplicate that layer, the one you just blurred, and change the blend mode to “Dissolve”. You will also notice that I started naming my layers, just to help keep things sorted, another good habit to get into.
Now you might really like the look at this point, or you may not. I don’t so I took one more step to give a more subtle effect. I merged the “Dissolved” and “Blurred” layers. Select them and then right-click and select”merge layers” or press CTL+E. You should have something similar to this.
7. Rinse and Repeat
Now I added a few layer effects also on this to give a tad bit of dimension but I am not going to lay out my secret sauce for you, you will need to determine your own style from here. All that’s left now is to repeat these steps to create more ribbons if you want…here is what I ended up with after adding another ribbon, and some Orton Effect.
Hope you found this tutorial helpful. If you did, please submit to Digg or share it with friends. If you have any other comments or questions, feel free to sound off in the comments and let me know what you think!
MV
