Bokeh and light leak

I’ve always loved light leaks and bokeh effects in photos, so I decided to try and digitally recreate these effects. I opened up some images from Flickr for inspiration and then using Photoshop I tried to replicate the effects. I’ve used a combination of custom made radial gradients together with the Screen and Lighten blending modes and various leves of opacity of each bokeh/circle layer. The challenging part was to make the circles blend into the image itself. I discovered that by creating various color glows behind the circles, they would blend more into the objects behind them (of course depending on which colors you’re using). I’m pretty satisfied with the result.