How To Photoshop A Lightsaber

If you have ever taken a film of a toy lightsaber, even the fancy replica kind with LED lights, y'all might take been disappointed that you couldn't really see the glow in the pictures. The lightsaber isn't really bright enough to compete with the lights that are necessary to bring out the detail of the handle and the warrior who wields information technology. Fortunately, it is actually pretty easy to create a glow event in Photoshop. I'm using Photoshop CS6, just there are similar tools in less expensive photograph-editing software. There are many ways to exercise it, and I'll show you an easy way that produces a outcome similar to the pictures you run into in books and posters.

This tutorial assumes that you are familiar with the basic editing tools and commands in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements and working with layers.

1. Have a flick of your Jedi (see Jedi portraits) and open up it in Photoshop or your editing software. I chose a pose where the blade was silhouetted against the obviously black groundwork. You'll see why this was helpful later on.

2. Adjacent, select the lightsaber blade using your favorite method. I used the Polygonal Lasso tool, merely information technology would exist pretty piece of cake to utilise the Quick Selection tool or even the Magic Wand tool. Y'all could show off using the Pen tool to trace a path and plow the path into a selection, but all that precision would be wasted. Information technology doesn't take to be a perfect selection, as yous will before long see why.

3. Create a new layer on height of the background (yous can name it "lightsaberglow") and employ your Paint Bucket tool to fill the selection with white. (You may find I fabricated a background re-create layer. I do that out of addiction to protect my original layer when I become crazy cloning out specks of grit and things like that, only it's not necessary for this tutorial.)

iv. Deselect the shape by pressing Ctrl + D. Then get to the carte du jour across the top and choose Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur. If you check the preview button, you tin can meet the degree of blur as you slide the arrow on the radius bar. The radius pixel value will vary with the size of the light saber in your picture and the resolution of your file. Your goal is to soften the border of the lightsaber shape so it blends nicely into the colored glow we are well-nigh to create.

5. Over again, using the menu across the peak, choose Layer>Layer Style>Outer Glow. I changed the default yellow to calorie-free blue (considering we're with the good guys) and adjusted the size slider until I was happy with the appearance. Yous can also adjust opacity and spread, only I thought the default values looked fine on my image. The blend way of Screen works fine on a dark background, but if your lightsaber overlies a lite-colored groundwork, you might need to change the alloy way to Normal to make the outer glow show upwardly.

Yous could actually be done here, merely in this case, I thought the lightsaber blade looked a bit chunky, so I decided to streamline information technology a bit more.

6. With the lightsaberglow layer still active in the layers palette, press Ctrl + T to actuate the Transform command. Resize the lightsaber shape past dragging on the walls of the bounding box and rotate by moving the corners if needed. Press Enter to consummate the transformation.

7. Make the lightsaberglow layer invisible past clicking off the centre icon to the left of the layer in the Layers Palette. Create a new layer under it that you can name "clone over old lightsaber".

eight. At present yous can use the Clone Stamp tool to embrace up the original lightsaber blade. This is why it comes in handy to have the bract over a apparently background.

9. In the Layers palette, click on the square to the left of the lightsaberglow layer to restore the eye icon and make the layer visible again. You lot should at present come across your new, improved lightsaber blade in its full, illuminated glory.