Designing Shouldn’t be a Hassle
Sunbursts are a really popular element in modern design, so it always amazes me how hard it is to find a suitable and free sunburst image to use in your designs. Not only is it hard to find a sunburst image, but when you do there is usually something wrong with it. Either there are too many ‘rays’, or too few, the image is too small, there isn’t a .psd file offered so any effects/filters you apply to the image will also effect the background, and so on…. All of this means more work for YOU, the designer.
That’s why I’ve come up with a simple set of sunburst images to help you (and me!), save some time browsing stock image sites. This set is not only offered free, but at HIGH RES (all images are over 1000px X 1000px in dimension), with a varied number of rays (you will see below the set includes an image with 10 rays, 20 rays and 40 rays). Best of all the images are available for download from their original .psd files, so you can forget about that annoying background and copy/paste your sunbursts into whatever document you like in a matter of seconds!
10 Ray Sunburst:
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20 Ray Sunburst:
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40 Ray Sunburst:
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It’s as Easy as ‘Gradient Overlay’!
Seeing as the sunbursts in these .psd files are separate from their backgrounds it’s as easy as applying a filter or gradient overlay to achieve some really nice effects!

You can Download the .ZIP file containing all 3 sunburst images by clicking here…

25 Comments so Far:
Comment by beets on July 19, 2008 at 3:57 pm
yay! freebies!
thanks Tom, and good job doing them as seperate layers… nice touch.
Comment by twopo on July 19, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Great Tom
Comment by Tom on July 19, 2008 at 4:22 pm
No problem guys
The separate layers thing is probably the most useful aspect, I’m personally really sick of having to cut out stock images such as these ones.
By the way feel free to Digg/Stumble at your discretion
Comment by Randomness on July 20, 2008 at 3:44 am
Woot! Thanks man. Free (useful) stuff is always awesome…but where is the tutorial on how to make sunbursts
Comment by Tom on July 20, 2008 at 2:20 pm
I actually used the technique from my music wallpaper tut, where I just created one segment, then duplicated it and rotated it around a middle point many times.
Comment by beets on July 21, 2008 at 4:51 am
you can also make a bunch of vertical bars and apply Distort > Polar Coordinates.
Comment by Tom on July 23, 2008 at 7:04 am
Thanks beets! This is what this site is really about, I want to learn stuff from my visitors as much as writing tutorials for them
That would have been a big time saver for me.
Comment by Britt on July 30, 2008 at 3:52 am
Wow, thank you so much. I’ve been looking for something exactly like this for such a long time!
Great site by the way, I found you through a link to your laptop ad tutorial from another blog on DesignFloat. Glad I found you.
Comment by Tom on July 30, 2008 at 7:17 am
No problem Britt! I’m glad that you’re enjoying the site, I should be posting another set of freebies in the next couple of days.
Comment by Alen on August 3, 2008 at 6:42 pm
Very nice. Thanks.
Comment by Tom on August 4, 2008 at 8:17 am
Cheers Alen
Comment by Cindy on August 15, 2008 at 5:13 am
These are awesome! Thanks so much for your generosity in sharing your designs!
Comment by Asuka on September 6, 2008 at 3:54 pm
That rocks! I love “starburts” shapes and can’t make theme. this is great.
Comment by Tom on September 12, 2008 at 2:15 am
Thanks for the support guys, I’m glad that you liked them!
Comment by Danh ba web 2.0 on September 19, 2008 at 1:19 pm
Great. Thanks for share !
Comment by explorerpro on October 16, 2008 at 2:04 pm
mediafire page error
Comment by Tom on October 18, 2008 at 3:30 pm
ExplorerPro: I’m not getting that problem, is anyone else?
Comment by sundownproject on November 12, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Thanks. Really handy for future projects.
Comment by Tom on November 12, 2008 at 4:08 pm
No problem Sundownproject, I’ve found them very useful myself
Comment by jamie on January 10, 2009 at 1:04 am
cheers man….these will help…also got fed up with cutting out : )
Comment by John on January 17, 2009 at 5:49 pm
Hi
Thanks for these will come in handy
Regards
John
Pingback by Create a Mock-Retro Poster Concept on January 24, 2009 at 1:14 am
[...] I grab a sunburst graphic from my Free Sunbursts Set and paste it onto a new layer above my typewriter layer. Then I set the layer blend mode to [...]
Comment by Rahul on March 19, 2009 at 11:09 am
Nice Sunbursts. This will really come in handy for me.
Comment by intofotos on May 5, 2009 at 2:14 pm
Thanks so much for these. Solved my problem and for that I am truly grateful. Appreciate your generosity.
Comment by Faisal Mohammad on June 14, 2009 at 12:13 pm
Thanks buddy!
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