Create light of nothing – One Four Challenge

My goal for the 4th week of One Four Challenge March was to create light from nothing.
Here are my steps:

1. I used some special brushes to create a background with palm trees. If you would like to work with some interesting brushes you can download some from here.
2. I copy-pasted the girl on a new layer
3. I selected the area where I wanted to create the light. When I had my selected area I created a Curves-layer and dragged the curve to the upper left side of the diagram to lighten up the selected area. So I got a bright area there. (I created the light source also with a special brush and then I selected it with the whole “light-area”.)
4. I added a quite strong gaussian blur to the light-layer and with this I got a more realistic light.

Feedback, tips and comments are welcome and please vote.

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Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4