Photoshop Tutorial: How to Create Lightning

Create Lightning from Scratch Using Photoshop

With Photoshop, you can pretty much do almost anything.� In essence, you're playing god of the computer art world, creating and editing whatever suites your taste.� If you want to play Zeus, then here are the steps to create lightning by using the tools that were already programmed in Photoshop.

Step 1: Making Clouds
You can't have lightning unless you got clouds, same in Photoshop.� First, create a new layer and name it Lightning.� You can name it whatever you want, but Lightning seems to be the most logical in this case.� Second, make sure your foreground and background colors are set to default, black and white, respectively.� This can be done manually, or you can just press D.� This is the same for both PC and Mac.
Once the colors are set to default, go to the Filter menu at the top of the window and choose Render, then Clouds.

Step 2:� Make More Clouds
Now, one cloud won't just create lightning, it's pretty harmless.� Again, same in Photoshop.� This time, instead of rendering another cloud, go back to Filter, Render, and then Difference Clouds.� Once that is done, go to the Image menu at the top of the window and select Adjust, then Invert.� This should result in something that looks like lightning.

Step 3: Finishing Touches
To finish, double click on the empty area to the right of the layer name, and then pull in the upper-left slider.� You'll want to split the sliders by holding down the Option key for Mac users and the Alt key for PC users.� The right half of the slider should be moved all the way to the right edge.� Next, grab the left edge of the slider and start moving to the right until you are satisfied with the look of the lightning.� To have an idea of how far you need to move it to begin making it look like lightning, you're going to have to move the slider almost all the way to the right as well.