Welcome back to my tutorials.
My current tutorial is devoted to the Star Wars Universe again and today I'll tell you how to create a stunning lightning effect used by siths (and by some jedi knights as well).
With the help of this tutorial you will be able to create a picture using the SW lightning effect.
So we'll take two characters - Jedi and Sith. For this purpose I made some pictures of two of my friends.
Like in the previous tutorials George acts as a Jedi.
And Sergio is our sith.
First you should Extract them out of the background. Read this tutorial if you don't know how to use extract tool.
Download the .psd file here.
Also I turned Sith to face the other side. Well, he is supposed to strike a Jedi, but not the air :).
Download the .psd file here.
Now it's time to merge both pictures with the SW background that I used last time in my previous tutorial.
Resize our heroes in order to match the background, and then remove the rest.
As you can see, the Sith coloring is different from the rest of the picture, and the Jedi in particular. So I decided to apply Match Color here.
I used the following settings:
So I got the following intermediate picture :
Now it's time to make the light saber. Use the same technique as in the first tutorial, for drawing a light saber. I made a 200x10 px selection. Angular points were moved by 0.8px.
Then I filled it in white, applied Gaussian Blur 2px, and used the following settings for Outer Glow:
Then I duplicated the light saber layer. Here is the result:
Now we'll add a lightning effect.
Create a new document. It is 270 px wide - this is approximate distance from the Sith's hand to the Jedi's light saber.
Paint the document with the help of Linear Gradient (black to white) moving downwards (or vice versa - it doesn't matter). After that apply Difference Clouds filter. Invert colors and choose the Levels panel. Move the middle slider to the far right, and the left one to the black lines.
You should get something looking like this:
Although you can make your lightning look somewhat differently.
Now create a new layer, and repeat the lightning creation procedure once more time. Make 3-5 layers with various kinds of lightning (I made 4). Then choose the Screen setting in the Blending Mode for all layers. This will make all lightning strokes visible.
Select all layers and move them to the picture of the Jedi and Sith. (While experimenting I changed the light saber color to green)
Select lightning layers one by one and use the Free Transform tool for giving them the right direction.
Finally I got this picture:
Here you can see lightning strokes moving from the Sith's hands to the light saber. Select all the lightning layers and merge them. Then choose Screen mode for the created layer.
Take the Eraser tool, choose any large soft brush, set opacity to 30% and remove all unnecessary lightning parts (everything beyond the light saber, beyond the hands, and all those that you don't want).
Use Hue-Saturation for choosing the color that you like most. I prefer blue:
For better effect I duplicated lightning layer, one layer moved downwards by a couple of pixels and another one moved upwards. Also, I changed the Levels settings for the duplicated layers - I moved the left slider to the right side, to about 90%.
I didn't like that AT-AT walker standing on the Sith's head. That's why I decided to stretch and move the background a little bit.
Almost done.
The only thing left is to add shadows, cast from fighting enemies. You can learn how to create shadows in this tutorial using R2D2 as an example. Also shadow from lightning would look great if it had light blue tint.
Here is another example of using a lightning effect.
More Tutorials: 
This is very cool tutorial. It is one of the best I could have seen.
I used the tutorial but slightly twiddled settings.
With GMod I managed to create this as a test image.
http://img352.imageshack.us/img352/8807/firstlightsabre3vc.jpg
As you can see, it works just fine.
I think i found the problem with it
its the part where its supposed to Fill, its set to fill a certain area, for example its set to fill from cm 45452 to cm 34343 but instead cm1100 is marked, is there anyway to fix this?
alright, i can now get awesome results doing it manually, the blur name is wrong tough, its Gaussian blur not radial? anyway i still cannot get the action script to work this is its lineup:
add to selection
Transform Selection
Make layer
Fill
Set selection
Gaussian Blur
Set layer styles of current layer
Layer Via copy
Make layer
Set selection
Fill
Gaussian Blur
Set layer styles of current layer
Layer via copy
layer via copy
layer via copy
the error i get is : cannot complete the action gaussian blur because the selected area is empty.
I've changed a few things in the tutorial text. Try it now - everything should be ok.
You had to download the “GeorgeBase.jpg” file and work with it because “George.jpg” is a scaled down version. All settings used in this tutorial are adopted to bigger photos. If you wish to recreate a lightsaber on another smaller picture then please decrease such parameters as "Radial Blur" and "Outer Glow".
Great tutorial! awesome results
im wondering tough, is there anyway i can get your action script?
whatever i do i keep getting an error selection is empty thing.
After step 3 i start recording, when im done i finnish, yet when i create a new file or try on the current one make a selection and run the script it gives me an error saying selection is empty, i tried recording from the begining but well...it opens the same file and does the same thing
And another thing, i was using the george.jpg to test on thing is i cant seem to recreate a lightsaber on another picture
alas one more thing, i dont understand the first transform part where you're supposed to do something with 20%?