Creating Lightning Effects It's generally preferable to draw out any special effects you want to create on paper first. A lot of computer-generated effects for comics stick out far too much and look like really bad special effects on a low budget movie. That being said, there are exceptions... Knowing that I was going to have a lightning strike in my comic, I decided to take a risk and generate it purely on Photoshop to see how it would blend in. Here's how the final image turned out... Luckily it looked pretty good, and here's how I went about doing it: - Draw in all the non-lightning elements and set them up to make room for the effect you're going to be creating. - In a seperate file, open up a block of the approximate height/ length you want for the lightning... then drop a vertical black-white gradient fill in there. If you can't find the Gradient Fill button , try holding the left mouse button over the normal fill bucket. It should pop-up in a drawer beside it. Black To White vertical Gradient Fill - Use the Filter>Distort>Wave and adjust the setting until you get a set of curves that you like: Filter>Distort>Wave - Use the Filter>Render>Difference Clouds on it: Filter>Render>Difference Clouds - Now go to Image>Adjust>Invert and we're almost there: Image>Adjust>Invert -Finally, go to Image>Adjust>Levels and grab the middle (grey) triangle and slide it right until you get the desired look for your lightning: Image>Adjust>Levels Once you've got the initial lightning strand, use the Transform tools to shift, rotate and scale it into the place you want. Clone bits of it or make other strands to create lightning "forking". Be sure to change the lighting and shadows around it to add to the effect of a massive amount of light striking a spot. The more that your environmental lighting works with your effect, the more it will blend in. I hope you found this informative. Like any effect, over doing it will make it seem less impressive, so don't go too berserk with lightning. Use it when it's appropriate and you really want to create some "zing"! Questions or comments? Feel free to E-Mail me. Home / Archive / About / History / Tutorials / Praise