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GIMP Tutorial #11 – How to Add a Spotlight Effect

This fabulous image editor is, besides being free and open source, one of the best out there, even if you compare it with commercial competitors like Photoshop. One of GIMP's greatest strengths is that it is extremely effective in its performance because it offers high quality results at really low resources consumption, only to make an example it only occupies around 60 MB in your hard drive (yes, I repeat, this is not a mistake, only as little as 60 MB). Today I'm going to tell you how to add some gorgeous spotlight effects to your images.

Of course you need GIMP in your PC to follow this tutorial. If you don't have it, just click the “Download” button above and get your free full copy of this great image editor.

So, to start with this spotlight creation you first need to open an existing image (or create one from scratch) and create a new layer and name it spotlights.

Next, select the Ellipse Select Tool and make some white ellipses by filling them with the Bucket Fill Tool. Do not forget to go to Select → None when you are done to deselect the ellipse.

Now, go to Filters → Blur → Gaussian Blur in the Image window menu and in its dialog set around 60 pixels for the Horizontal parameter and 60 pixels for the Vertical. When you are done click OK.

And this is how it will look:

You can add as many as you want and place them differently to see different effects for the same feature.

Final Words
As you can see, adding some interesting spotlight effects to your images or drawings is easy and straightforward if you do it with GIMP. Give this amazing free image editor a try, download it by clicking the “Download Now” link below and start creating outstanding images with astonishing effects!