Have you ever seen those really cool looking lighting bolts added to pictures? Did you ever wonder how they did that? Well here is a short tutorial on making that really cool effect. This was one of the 1st tricks I learned in Photo Shop and wanted to share it with you.
1. Open a new canvas in Photo Shop 500 X 500 would be a good size.
2. Make sure that your foreground color is black and the background is white.
3. Go to your Gradient Tool and use these settings: Linear Gradient, Mode Difference and Opacity 100%. Make sure the Reserve, Transparency and Dither are NOT checked.
4. Drag from left to right, while holding Shift down and then drag back right to left. You may have to play with this for a while; it took me a few tries because the canvas kept going back to black.
5. In the tool bar go to Filter>Render>Difference of Clouds. You should be able to see the outline of two lighting bolts now. If you don't, step back to a blank canvas and redo the Gradient tool; it may take a few tries.
6. You will now invert your canvas by pushing Ctrl+I.
7. In the Tool Bar go to Image> Adjustments>Levels. You will want to use the following Input Levels in the dialog boxes: 220, 0.10, and 255. Output levels 0, 255. You are now able to see the bolts.
8. Then hit Ctl + U, this will bring up the Hue/Saturation dialog. Make sure the Colorize is selected, choose your color. Set Hue at 239 Saturation at 54 and Lightness to 0.
9. Go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur and set the radius to 0.5
Then just for fun I added a few more layers with cloud effects and different transparencies and I have a storm.
// posted by BasicAnn on 7/18/2005 11:50:00 AM / Permanent Link
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