Tutorial: Making Lightsabers in Photoshop

[Marius Fett]

Hey guys. I picked up this neat little trick a few days ago and thought you might enjoy learning it yourselves.

 

It involves making realistic saber blades in Photoshop. It takes around 2-3 minutes to do one blade.

 

First you'll need a picture to edit. It could be a picture from a movie, or it could be one of yourself.

 

I'll use this one of Aragorn from Lord of The Rings:

 

 

This picture will be easy to edit because it already has a sword in it to use as a size guide.

 

If your chosen image doesn't have a sword or other long object (<-- hehe kinky) you'll have to improvise.

 

Right, open your picture in Photoshop and add a new layer with these settings:

 

 

REMEMBER TO CHECK THE FILL WITH SCREEN NEUTRAL COLOUR (BLACK) BOX.

 

Now, select your new layer and select the line tool. Set its weight to 20 px and draw a line along the blade of the sword. (Or if you don't have a sword or long object ( hehe more kinkyness) in the pic, put the line where you think it should be.

 

Here is mine now:

 

 

Now, the tip of the blade needs to be rounded, so using the brush/pencil tool, round the end off.

(If the tip of the blade isn't in the picture you don't need to worry about it.)

 

Here is mine now:

 

 

Next, give your layer a Gaussian Blur with a value of 1:

 

 

This will make the core of the blade smoother and much nicer looking.

 

Now, make three copies of your layer, and select the first copy.

 

Give it a Gaussian Blur, and as the amount number, put the weight you used for the line. For me this is 20.

 

Then select the second copy and give THAT a Gaussian Blur. For the value, put double what you used on the first copy. I have to use 40.

 

Then, for the third copy, give a Gaussian Blur of double the last value (four times the original value) which is 80 for me.

 

Now, you should have your layers arranged like this:

 

 

Select the top one like I have and press CTRL+E three times. This will merge the three copies back into the original layer you made earlier. Now the only two layers you should have are Background and Layer 1.

 

Your saber should look like this:

 

 

Now, with Layer 1 selected, go to Image>Adjustments>Colour Balance.

 

 

Move the sliders around for Midtones and Highlights, (NOT SHADOWS) to get the colour for your blade.

 

As they say on TV, here's one I did earlier:

 

 

And here's a few more just for kicks:

 

 

As you can probably tell, i'm something of a Lord of The Rings fan

 

Well, hope you enjoyed this fun little tutorial.

 

Post some pics of your own sabers for us to see.

 

Experiment with different widths etc...

 

-DDD

[Exile007]

Nice, I loved doing this, back when I was a lightsaber freak.

 

Excellent tutorial as always DDD, but I don't think it's supposed to be in Holowan Labs.

[Marius Fett]

I couldn't think where else to put it, besides, it can be used for modding, because the renders of saber blades you get from max are awful.

 

You can use this tutorial to make your own.

[TriggerGod]

Alright, now how about trying a tut on how to put those in game

[Inyri]

The glow and the core are much too thick. It's a good start, but keep working and compare to film photos to refine.

[Sithspecter]

I personally like the second pic.