Having trouble with making a sun lens flare png

[Kuutittaja]

Hey, so as of late I've been having some trouble with photoshop. I've tried to make a sun and it's lens flare effect, but I also want the background to be entirely transparent. The problem is, that immediately when I don't have a custom background on the image the effect changes, and the layer on top of which the effect was originally added on shows up (the layer is just a solid black color).

So basically I'd just want a fully transparent png of the sun and it's lens flare without anything else, so I could just add that effect on anything I'd want/need.

I myself am not an expert with photoshop, so I have no idea what to do, or whether the problem is with my settings, or with the steps I take.

The tutorial I followed with making the sun was: https://design.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-create-sunlight-effect-in-photoshop--cms-31335

[Barbara Ash]

I looked at the tutorial. Making a png would not work because the effect depends on multiple layers and multiple blend modes.

What you could do is put all of the layers that make up the sun and it's lens flare into a group folder. Drag that group on top of any image to which you want to apply the sun and lens flare.

Another way would be to create an action for all the steps so that when you want to apply it to an image, all you'd need to do is click once to run the action.

[Kuutittaja]

I see that does make sense, I might try those next time I'm working on the project and see how they would work for me. But do you happen to know if there's any other way or pattern to make the same or perhaps a similar effect, that you could then turn into a proper transparent png image?

[Barbara Ash]

Using this tutorial you could make a transparent png by combining all of the sun ray layers when you finish the tutorial. The look of the sun rays is a little different from the tutorial you followed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H-42_BYGqI

There are no doubt other tutorials that you could explore.