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Creating Lightning With Photoshop

This tutorial will explain a very easy way to create lightning in photoshop.

Difficulty=2/10

Begin by creating a rectangular image, mine was 500px by 200px. Then pick black and white as your foreground and background colors and use the gradient tool to create a gradient from the top of the image down to the bottom. It should look like this:
Gradient.jpg


The next thing you want to do is Filter>Render>Difference Clouds. Now it will look like this:
DifferenceClouds.jpg


The third step is to press Ctrl+I to invert the colors in the picture. Your image should now look slightly like lightning:
InvertedColor.jpg


Now to really make it look like lightning you must press Ctrl+L to bring up the Levels box. Then drag the arrow that is in the middle of the bar all the way to the right, now it should look like there are only two arrows and you should have some nice looking white lightning like this:
Levels.jpg


A final optional step that will really add some pizazz is to change the color of the lightning. To do this, press Ctrl+U to bring up the Hue/Saturation box. Put a check mark in the colorize box and then adjust the bars as you wish. I decided to go with some awesome purple lightning and it turned out like this:
Color.jpg


I hope this tutorial was helpful. If you want to use the lightning in another picture just CnP it over there and change the layer's blending type to screen. This will get rid of the black box and you will be left with nothing but lightning.
 
Level 26
Joined
Nov 19, 2007
Messages
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Was another tutorial pretty much identical to this one, but that got graveyarded and deleted, I think.

So pretty much, I think this one's doomed too. Also, I see no practical application of this thing in the first place. Not sure why you'd ever need it for warcraft, but eh. Who cares.
 
I was unaware that someone had made a tutorial covering this same technique. Also, there are several tutorials in the 2D Art section that are just that, 2D Art tutorials, not Warcraft tutorials and they have no application in Warcraft. This technique does have applications elsewhere, like in this project I did some time ago(see thumbnail).
 

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