Adding lightsabers.

grimloch

rymus wrote:

C'mon now with the photoshop tutorials people...

I don't know exactly what this forum is intended for but someone, albeit jokingly, mentioned this on the forum proposal thread so I reckon it's a good a place to start as any. Either way, this is a nice simple tutorial that doesn't take long to do at all.

1.Take a stock photograph, like so:





2.Now make a new layer. Ctrl + Shift + N or:



Then add in a lightsaber shaft/handle, (I've attached one at the end of the post and I apologise for the poor cutting) using ctrl + t to scale it down to a manageable size that fits your picture. To rotate the handle go to Edit->Transform->Rotate. Erase the bits that the hand should cover. You can do this with the eraser tool.





3.Now the blade gets done. Go to Layer->New Layer first of all.





4.Then when that screen pops up, change the blending mode to screen and fill it with a screen neutral colour. Like the picture below:





5.Once that's done, whip out the line tool.




Then draw a line from the handle, making sure your foreground colour is white. Ensure the "Fill Pixels" box is checked. If you need to round off the end of the blade, a soft round brush does the trick.





6.A new and better technique I came across the other day is to use Filter->Blur->Gaussian Blur as opposed to using an outer glow effect. What he did was to duplicate the lightsaber blade layer three or four times. Ctrl + J or



At this stage, you should have you background layer, the handle layer, and 5 sabre layers.

Now perform the gaussian blur, starting at the lowest layer.



Layer 1: 1.0 pixel blur
Layer 2: 5.0 pixel blur
Layer 3: 10.0 pixel blue
Layer 4: 20.0 pixel blur
Layer 5: 30.0 pixel blue

Depending on your picture, the blade looks like it's glowing. Mine has a white background so you can't really tell. But not to worry, we'll be fixing that up shortly enough:





7.We need to merge the blade layers into one layer. You can do this by clicking on the top layer and then pressing ctrl + E. This merges a layer with the one directly below it. Your layer palette, on the right hand side, will look like this:





8.Now we have the blade, the only thing that's off is the colour. Making sure that the top layer(merged saber layers) is selected, press ctrl + B or go to Image->Adjustments->Colour Balance. It's a matter of playing around with the settings until you get something you think looks good. Like I said, I have a white background so it looks crap:



And there you are, transform your friends and family into jedi in a few short minutes.

This is the lightsaber on its own:



I've dropped the quality of those pictures to make things load faster so it will look better once you do it yourself.

Zillah

grimloch wrote:

I don't know exactly what this forum is intended for

No you really don't...

This sort of stuff goes in Digital Art and Design. Unless I'm much more stupid than I think then this forum exists for people to discuss methods for improving or enhancing their photos, such as traditional things like sepia or B&W conversions, or more modern things such as shapening, colour adjustment and dust removal, not crude sci-fi gimics.

Dundhoone

yes but others on the forum have sense of humor.
its a fun way to learn about layers/gaussian blur.
i love it. Lightsabers for everyone!!!

Zillah

Dundhoone wrote:

yes but others on the forum have sense of humor.
its a fun way to learn about layers/gaussian blur.
i love it. Lightsabers for everyone!!!

Then make a tutorial on how to use layers and gaussian blur. Apply it to useful photography, not gimics.

Really, are lightsabers the kind of tone we want to set? Our main argument to get the forum was that it was distincinctly different from Digital Art and Design.

311

It could have easily been a javelin in the guys hand and he could easily have had a medal around his neck.
Does it really matter what the content of the photo is ,if the tutorial is easy to read and understand.
I think the post is a good example of how to explain a procedure for photoshop.

Ruu_Old

_Brian_ wrote:

It could have easily been a javelin in the guys hand and he could easily have had a medal around his neck.
Does it really matter what the content of the photo is ,if the tutorial is easy to read and understand.
I think the post is a good example of how to explain a procedure for photoshop.

Agreed.

Zillah

_Brian_ wrote:

It could have easily been a javelin in the guys hand and he could easily have had a medal around his neck.
Does it really matter what the content of the photo is ,if the tutorial is easy to read and understand.
I think the post is a good example of how to explain a procedure for photoshop.

Yes, yes it is. But thats not the purpose of the forum, is it? Theres a reason we got a new forum seperate from Digital Art.

I'm gonna step away from this and PM rymus, its his call on what goes.

rymus

hmm... So the way this was presented seems to make it more digital art/design but given that it makes use of photoshop technique thats relevant here I'll leave it for now. If others take exception to it, I may re-evaluate. Cheers for the pm Zillah.