The Truth about Raining Cats and Dogs

So, you're coloring a story, and you've come to a place where it calls for lightning. The character is weilding some kind of electrical energy power... or some form of lightning gun, and you need to supply the juice. You're thinking, "There's just got to be some Photoshop trick for auto-magically creating lightning, right?"

Here's the deal... unless you have a nice plug-in (see the bottom of this tutorial), there's really no easy way to do lightning.

Honest! Lightning is an organic effect that, similar to clouds, requires a certain amount of personal attention and observation to truly render correctly. Any tutorial that claims to create lightning "hands-off" without a custom plug-in or hands-on tweaking is probably stretching the truth, and the results will show.

That said, here's some tips to give you a good place to start traipsing the light fantastic...

Let there be Light!

1.) In Photoshop, create an image 500 high by 500 pixels wide. Next, hit the "D" key, to make sure your foreground color is set to "black" (this is one of Photoshop's standard quick-key features). Fill this screen with BLACK, then create a new layer (Shift + Ctrl + N) to work on.

2.) Now, go to the "Channels" palette (found under the Windows menu) and create a new Channel by clicking on the "Create New Channel" button at the bottom of this window. Your new channel should be called "Alpha 1".

3.) Choose Filter > Render > Clouds. This is the base to your lightning. Render Clouds are a fairly flexible feature you'll find can be used to create lots of interesting effects, even fire. Go to the menus and choose Filter > Stylize > Solarize. Then, choose Image > Adjust > Equalize. Now we're getting somewhere! You can start to see the lightning designs forming now. Go to Image > Adjust > Levels (Crtl + L), then set the input levels to 238, 1.00, 255.

4.) If you're not seeing an adequate cover of "squiggly" lines on your screen, just go back to step 3 and repeat until you do. Better yet, before doing step 3, start recording an "Action" (--or download and play the action listed here).
"Actions" are a feature that allows Photoshop to automatically redo a series of commands without having to lift a finger or navigate a menu (very nice). This will allow you to play the action as many times as you need to see the results you want. The lines should squiggle across the screen in a pattern you feel you can work with.

5.) Next, you want to choose this as your selection. Either click the "Load channel as Selection" button at the bottom of this palette window, or choose Select > Load Selection, and set the Source: channel to "Alpha 1". Hitting Ctrl + ~ will switch you back to the Layers palette. Fill the selection with WHITE, and on top of the other black layer, your squiggles should show up just fine once more.

6.) Here's where you have to start using your own sense of intuition. Depending on the kind of results you want, crack out your Eraser tool and start removing a number of sections in the squiggles. You're basically trying to create an assortment of forks, arcs, and main stems for your lightning effect. Think of it as making a "lightning pack". When you're done, you may have something that looks like the picture shown.

7.) Alright. Now, you're ready to start piecing it together (quite literally, actually...). Get your "lasso" tool, and start selecting a few of those pieces. As you select each piece of squiggle with the lasso, before you drag it, hold down the "Ctrl" key to make sure you pull it up as you drag the selection to a new part of the screen. So, drag, rotate and resize the bits of lightning to compliment whatever you've designated as the main shaft.

8.) As the last thing you really need to do yourself, select the "smudge" tool from the TOOL palette (Quickey - R). Hit the "Return" key to pull up the "Options" palette for the tool. Set the "Pressure" to 96-97%. Go to different areas of the lightning and them drag out. Your looking to create miscellaneous tributaries of sparks occurring along the main arcs of energy.

9.) Finally, Photoshop 5 introduced a wonderful feature called "layer effects" that makes creating the following glow effect very simple. From the menus, choose Layer > Effect > Outer Glow.... Click on the color, and set it to R: 215, B: 200, and C:255 (something bluish). Next, set Opacity to 95%, Blur to 15 pixels, and Intensity to 75%. This will give your lightning the perfect amount of ethereal glow. --And your done!

Finishing Touches

The preceeding was a demonstration of a technique that can be applied in a number of different ways. You may even experiment with applying Ripple or Wave Distortion filters to the final results to further shake things up. Even better, try duplicating your final lightning layer (with glow), and after blurring it out (gaussian blur radius:6), set the blend-mode of the layer to "Diffuse". Adjusting the Layer Opacity down to 10% or so gives you interesting "sparks" (click here for example).

Also, if you're looking to create truly authentic looking lightning, definitely keep some REAL photo reference nearby when constructing a "lightning pack" during steps 3 and especially 6. Lastly, when your lightning designs are still just a selection, you can use SELECT > MODIFY > Expand/Contract to create larger and smaller bolt sets. Mix and match sizes with new layers and come up with some truly detailed and elaborate energy effects. This technique basically gives you the raw material for endless variation.

Below is an example of the general technique in the context of an illustration. The Airbrush tool was used to give the lightning more glow.

Click for Larger Image