Star Wars: Sith Lightning vs Jedi Lightsaber (Exclusive Tutorial)

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.

Click to enlarge

And Sergio is our sith.

Click to enlarge

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.

Click to enlarge

Resize our heroes in order to match the background, and then remove the rest.

Click to enlarge

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 :

Click to enlarge

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.

Click to enlarge

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:

Click to enlarge

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)

Click to enlarge

Select lightning layers one by one and use the Free Transform tool for giving them the right direction.

Click to enlarge

Finally I got this picture:

Click to enlarge

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).

Click to enlarge

Use Hue-Saturation for choosing the color that you like most. I prefer blue:

Click to enlarge

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%.

Click to enlarge

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.

Click to enlarge

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.

Click to enlarge

Here is another example of using a lightning effect.

Click to enlarge