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Tutorials

Creating some cool lightning effects

Oct 18th 2005
Lightning Effects for Fun and Profit:
1.
To start out, let's make a new image, make it 400 pixels wide and 200 pixels high. Make sure you have Black and White as your foreground and background colors, and select the gradient tool. With the gradient "Foreground to Background" selected, make a gradient from top to bottom on the image.

 2.
Now, go to Filters>Render>Difference Clouds. After doing this, you can see it starting to form already.

 3.
Go to Image>Adjust>Invert. Now the lightning is white, but it's too bright....

 4.
So go to Image>Adjust>Levels. Drag the black mark up towards the white until the lightning is at the level you like. There is no right answer on where to place this, it all depends on where you want it. After doing this, you should have some nice looking lightning, but don't stop there...

 5.
Go to Image>Adjust>Hue/Saturation, check the colorize box, and pick your shade. My favorite is going with Blue, but like before, there's no right answer. There are a lot of different ways you can go with this. It'll be no time before you start seeing ways you can incorporate this into your projects. If you need some color variations, it works great as a text coloring.
 6.
Here the effect is applied to some text... let your imagination run wild on what you can do with this simple effect.