Transcript:
Today. I’m going to show you how to make a cool lightsaber Effect in Photoshop [Music] Star Wars fan. Or not. You have to admit that lightsabers are one of the coolest things around. Unfortunately, unless you’ve just invented magic was no way to have one in real life. What we need to do is turn to. Photoshop to create the fact, and it’s not as hard as you think. Let’s begin, Alright? Here’s our still image. It’s not the highest resolution it is 1080p because it’s a screen grab from thick intro there zoom in to 100% we can see that we’ve got a fairly crisp image. Now we should have enough to work with, so let’s zoom back out and do our first steps, which is to drag the background layer down to the new layer button, duplicate it and then to delete the original going to create one new layer. And this is going to be the fun bit. This is the lightsaber. Now, if those help that. I’m using a lightsaber model from the Star War’s Jedi challenges game. Check out my video review of that, but you could if you wanted to use just a shiny piece of pipe or a piece of metal or something like that. You can hide this type of thing with the effects. No one really be looking at the handle. Once you’ve got the arrest of the effects going, all right, so we’re going to switch to a white brush and making sure on our new layer. I like to have a slightly fuzzy brush and I like to use the left and right square brackets Besides it if we want it pretty close to the handle size. Now there’s a trick for getting a perfectly straight line here. What we’re going to do is do a single click in the white and then bring the mouse to the side. I’ll shift on the keyboard. Do a second click. What it actually does is draw a straight line between the two points where you just clicked and that’s the shift key again. That does that, actually. I think this is a little bit small, so I’ll make my brush a little bit bigger. I’ll shift click, and there come over here. Hold shift, click again. And that’s looking much more like it, but now you’re probably thinking, Michael. That looks okay, But lightsabers, they’re not white, they’re colored. Well, that’s where we start to use our layer blending effects making sure we still have our lightsaber layer selected. We’re going to come to the FX button and we’re going to come to outer glow. Okay, now’s the fun bit. We get to pick which color our light server is going to be, but this one if I’m going to go for the evil red and already starting to see that it’s looking a lot more like a lightsaber. Let’s take a that color, and then we have to play with the spread and science. The science is as it sounds. It’s the size of the outer glow effect the spread is to do with. How course it is or more like a feather is probably a better way You could describe it. You can see if I make it really big. Oh, get this nice, radiant glow coming around it and like I promised already kind of hiding the handle, but we’re going to do a lot more effects, so people don’t really notice it any more than that. If you get your size to spread ratio wrong, you’ll find it becomes far too harsh. So please play with the sliders until you get a decent effect, okay. I’m happy with that like there. I think I’d like to be a little bit darker red, so I’m going to turn after the opacity, probably not quite a hundred percent. Maybe around ninety ninety-five. And I’m happy with that. So I’m gonna hit okay, okay. Next thing we’re going to do, We’re going to create another new layer and while here sort of they’re confusing, we might as well rename some of these this one. I’m going to call red glow now at the moment. The lightsaber looks like a lightsaber. We’ve done exactly what we need to there, But the problem is if I was really holding something in front of me that was blowing that bright red. Then I would expect to see myself lit up from that, and at the moment, I don’t have anything like that. And therefore it loses realism, so lets. Fix this problem. Now, what we’re going to do is make sure we have a brush selected and it has to be a soft edge brush, however, we’re going to turn down the flow to about 50% because we don’t want to be drawing as dark as we can right at the beginning. We want to leave our itself a little bit of room to build up colors, so we’re not a hundred percent straight away, so I’m going to make this bigger and what we’re aiming for here is to paint some red onto all of the areas that would be exposed to the lightsaber light. So for instance, this back arm would be in the shadows, and you wouldn’t see it’s much, however, directly underneath that the side of my hand and upper part of my arm and shoulder, and you can imagine, will be quite lit up red, so let’s go through and start to paint that now. It would probably have a little bit on my thyroid. Oh, that’s probably more subtle, so lets. Turn this down to 25% with that bit. If we want a really cool look, we can do things like under for eyes. The cheekbone would be catching the light, probably the tips of the ears and probably to build up. Some of these are the subtle areas here. If we turn it right down to 10% we can now start to fade in some of these areas on the edge with a larger brush. You want a nice gradient going across? All right, you’re probably thinking. This looks pretty ridiculous, but there is a little secret. Step coming up. That’s going to make all the difference now. The glove is in the right place, but obviously it’s way too strong. One thing you might be thinking is that you got to turn down. The opacity, and that works fairly well, but what we really need to do is to change the layer blending effect from our red glow layer from normal to soft light. Now, instead of just having it harshly over the top, it’s running work with the colors already in there. What we can do to make this more subtle is to turn down the opacity until we get more of a subtle. Sheen, now you might be thinking, okay. That’s not very obvious there, but if you toggle it on and off, you can see that it’s creating a lot more realistic effect now. The reason we left our brush on only 10% before is because now we can turn it right up and fill in any areas that need a lot stir on the reps. I’d suggest the tip of the shoulder. It’s gonna need a lot stronger red, so it looks like not much is happening, but we are subtly building up the color. I think I might turn down the flow and do a little bit on the side of my face here. I think that will really add to the effect if I’m unhappy with any of these because I think they’re too strong. I think up to the eraser once again. Make sure I have a soft brush. Use the square brackets to change the size down smaller And I can simply come back and erase here. This bit here. I think is a little bit too strong, so I’m going to turn down the flow and then just brush over the top. Okay, let’s toggle the layer opacity on enough. People are getting a nice red glow here. I think how it means is looking not too bad, but something else we can do to make our character pop a little bit more and the problem is really in the background. We didn’t expect to see someone sitting in a room like this with a light saber, so what we will need to do is to make the background fade and be a little bit darker to make our subject and the light saber stand out what we’re going to come to background copy and we’re gonna create a new blank layer. We’re gonna come to the brush. Make sure it’s on black and make sure our flow is only on about 50% just like last time. We want to leave ourselves somewhere to go. We don’t want it to be as black as possible from the start. I like to zoom out a long way when I’m doing background effects because you can fit more on the screen and see what you’re doing a little bit easier. Make sure you have a soft brush and use the keyboard keys to change the size. Aiming for is a nice black ring around the outside, we can build this up layer by layer. Just make sure there’s no completely dark bits apart from the very edges of the picture. Here you don’t want any completely dark bits, post it to the middle of the picture, or it’s going to look pretty strange, okay. That should be a close enough contour. Looks a little bit better already. We’re popping out, but if we’d really want to accentuate our red glow from the lightsaber, we’re going to do one more step, and that is to apply an outer glow to this black frame that we’ve just drawn. Let’s go to layer effects. Outer glow, change the color to red. And if you feel the need, you can play with the different settings here. One thing that you definitely want to play with is the opacity. You don’t want this to be too bright? You want this to be fairly subtle? I’m cutting one down until I can just see a little red glow around the edges and hit, okay. I feel any of these. Other bits are too dark, for instance, near this lightsaber here. Maybe the contrast is a little bit, too high can turn down the opacity for the layer overall until it’s a little bit more subtle. I think I’m pretty happy with that just to counter that. I’m going to come back to my outer glow and turn it up a little bit. So the overall effect is a little bit stronger. All right, then we have it. I’ll finish the lightsaber effect, lets. Go through what we did step by step here is our raw image We started with. We then drew a lightsaber in white, and then we added an outer glow red effect where then came and painted our own red glow on our body in all the areas that would be exposed to the light and that gave it the red. Sheen, we then did the black background to make it pop, and once again we applied an outer glow on that just to add a ring of color like an aura of light coming around the lightsaber. Save the image and you’re done. Well, there you have it. A lightsaber effect in not that much time at all, thanks for watching and subscribe to see more easy to follow. Photoshop tutorials, gday. It’s Michael again. If you like the video, then please click like if you want to see more content like this in future click. Subscribe and make sure you click on the bell to receive every notification. If you really want to support the channel and see exclusive content, become a patron, visit my patreon page. See you next time.