Alright, the LightSaber Effect ===========
Okay than, the LightSaber effect is probally the most over used effect in the world. It's been used in countless home made films and big budget movies alike.
And how to make this effect is a subject that is brought up at so many online forums that's it's not even funny.
However, that LightSaber effect is something that can both fun and impressive to watch.
so let's get down to business, Step 1:
Instaed of reading this boring text tutorial you could just watch my video tutorial! You'll probably grasp the idea better if you watch the video.
Although I use a program called Paint Shop Pro 8, this tutorial should work in most other photo editing programs too.
1: Open up your Image and get ready to have some fun!
First thing we're going to do is too draw a white line where you want your lightsaber to be, this is going to be the core of the lightsaber. You can use whatever you want to make this line, I'm going to use the line tool but you can chose what you want.
Now that we have that nice white line, let's go ahaed and make a new Raster Layer, Layers>New Raster Layer>. Name this layer glow. Make sure to set the blend mode to Screen. (Note that you don't have to name your new layer anything, but it makes it easyer to explain this way.)
Got that? Great, now that we have our new layer named glow we can start the realy fun. Click on your glow layer once to make sure you have it selected. Now get your paint brush tool out and make sure to make the size of it bigger than the line you made earlyer.
Example, if you made your white line to be 13px in width than I would set my paint brush to about 27px in width.
Also make sure to make your paint brush whatever color you want your lightsaber to be.
Ok, now with your paint brush click once at bottom of your lightsaber's blade. (The white line) and hold down the Shift botton on your keyboard. HOLD it down. Move your paint brush to top of your lightsaber's blade, and now click again and left off the shift key. You'll see that all the space between your first and last click was filled to make a nice stright line. Your picture should look link this now
Ok, almost done, right click on your glow layer and select Duplicate.
You'll see that you have made another layer called copy of glow, Now right click on the copy of glow layer and select Duplicate. You should now have made yet another layer, this one should be called copy(2) of glow.
And here's the last few steps, click on your last layer,(copy 2 of glow) layer so that you have it selected. Go to Adjust, Blur, Guassian Blur... and give it blur of about 8.
Click on your next layer(copy of glow) and give it a blur of 10 or so... Click on your last layer, the original glow layer, and give this a glow of about 5.
And bam! You're done!
The final out come of your image will depend on a few things, How much gaussian blur you give it, how light or dark your image is and what color you use for the saber.
Green, Blue, and Red are always good choices.
