Drawing Star Wars Lightsaber (Exclusive Tutorial)

In a previous tutorial I described how to draw realistic Jedi light saber. In this tutorial I will tell you how to make custom Star Wars Theme using R2D2's hologram of a Jedi Knight.

1. For starters you need to choose a background relevant to the Star Wars theme. Open the picture in Photoshop.


2. In another window open a silhouette that you would like to add to the background. I chose George from the previous tutorial.



Extract George silhouette from the image. Read this tutorial if you don't know how to use extract tool.



3. Drag the layer with George from layers pallete to the window with background.

4. Call Hue/Saturation, check colorize and make it blue.



5. Apply Gaussian Blur wign radius about 0.5-1px.

6. Add Outer Glow using the settings below:



You will have something like this:



7. Set opacity at about 35% and duplicate the layer.
8. Create new layer and add 1px height horizontal lines with intervals of 1px. Read the Scanlines tutorial to learn how to do this in a simple way.
9. Load selection on the layer with the lines. Then select one of the layers with George and press Del. Then .

You will have something like this:



10. Set opacity at about 65% and duplicate layer 1-3 times.

11. Now it's time to add R2D2 image to the image. Droid should be placed opposite to the hologram (in left corner of the picture). Open it in Photoshop and repeat extraction procedure described in the second step for R2D2. Then drag the layer with droid from layers pallete to the window with George and background.

12.R2D2 and the background colors are really different, obviously they are taken from different pictures. So you should fit R2D2 color to background color. So match color - select source: YOUR .PSD, layer: Background, and use my settings shown below.



Now you will get something like this:


13. Now it would be good to add shadow to R2D2. Drop Shadow in Blending options is not good enough, so we will add it in another way. Duplicate the layer with R2D2. Select lower layer with droid and using Free Transform tool distort it like shown on the picture below.



Now load selection from this layer, fill it with black and set opacity 30%.



14. Select Polygonal Lasso Tool and make a selection as shown below in my picture.



Then while pressing Ctrl+Alt, click on the layer with George.



15. Create a new layer and fill the selection with #808FFF. Set opacity to about 50%. Then deselect and apply Gaussian Blur with radius of about 6-7px.



That's all - your hologram is ready.

The last thing you can do is to make background more contrast - make it darker.

Select background layer. Then go to Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Brightness/Contrast... Press OK and then use the following settings:



Here is my final result.