Can someone tellme some of the best ways of creaing lightning bolts in postwork? Some basic walk through explanations would be appraciated as I'm not totally familiar with both programs yet. Basically what I want to do is add in lightning bolts to an image to give either a nice storm or serious magical effect. Thanks in advance.

Get a plugin called Xenofex is my advice

Any other ways that don't involve me having to spend money I don't have on a plug in I've never heard of?

Attached Link: http://www.freephotoshop.com/html/almathera.html

Do you have Eye Candy? If you do you could draw the lightning by hand, then use the gradient glow filter to give it some light. There's also a free download of the Almathera plugin, which included a lightning maker that's quite good

Nope, no Eye Candy, I'll check out the Almathera link and also see what I can create by doing it by hand. Cheers

There's a tutorial on renderosity in the Offsite tutes section. I used it on my Stun Gun animation... Check it out. Cory BS

Hummmm, got me thinkin' i tossed together a quick kludge of some thoughts for your "non"plugin method...

First make a layer and run the "clouds" filter (Filter --> Render --> Clouds)

next run the "difference clouds" filter (Filter --> Render --> Difference Clouds) on the same layer.

Open the "levels" (Ctrl+L) and slid the white slider to the left, watch the "veins" form, if they don't look right, cancel and run the "difference clouds" filter again (Ctrl+F will run the "last used" filter)

experiment with this until you get some good veins...

next duplicate the layer and invert it (Image --> Adjustments--> Invert) to give yourself a black sky and white veins.

go back to your other layer an change the "hue & saturation" (Cmd/Ctrl+U) Click "colourize" and play with the hue slider to change the colour. You may also want to adjust the saturation a bit. Make sure that preview is checked.

Select the "magic wand" tool and click on the white area, while it is selected, select the remaining white areas by choosing "similar" from the menu (Select --> Similar)
hit the "delete" key. now your layer only has the coloured veins.

duplicate this and change the "blend mode" to Overlay and run the Gaussian Blur filter (Filter--> Blur--> Gaussian Blur) making adjustment to suit your needs

you can duplicate this layer again to strenghten the glow effect...

you can also clone segments to add additional veins/bolts...

this is just an idea that may work for a "by scratch" - NO PLUGIN used method...
hope it helps

:)
retrocity

Cory, do you mean this one?

Tutorial: Lightningbolts
Description: How to make lightning bolts in photoshop whe you dont have Xenofex No plugins needed
Skill Level: Beginner
Related Apps: Photoshop 5 , 6
Submitter: By zutgorak
Date Added: Sep 17, 2001
PC Type: PC/Mac

the link seems to be dead... i get an "OOOPS" page (page missing)

ratz! cause it woulda' saved me a hecka' lot of typing!!!

:)
retrocity

Try getting some pics of lightning from the web, bigger the better. Pull the levels in so you've got good contrast then select the white with the wand (and select similar as retrocity said). You might need to deselect any stray bits of selection with lasso of marquee. Go into quick mask and scale up your selection then save it as an alpha channel. Now you can drag the channel across to your pic, make selection from it, fill that and follow retrocitys suggestions for blurring, color etc. It works pretty well even if the original is low res. The attached pic is part of a poster done this way. Jake

Attached Link: Xenofex info from Alien Skin

And you can just paint them buy hand, ofcourse. With example photo's of real world lightning an shift-clicking with brushes in decreasing sizes. Copying that layer and blurring it et all. For the purists who do not want to use stuff they did not make themself. btw, Xenofex is nice of you are far-from-purist, but it will cost you some money. And it is hardly ever used professionally. See link

I thought there was a free plugin that did this (using the clouds thingie). I'd have to be at home where I could look it up 'cause I think I got it to look at one day.

Maybe an action?

Attached Link: http://www.macdirectory.com/reviews/KPTeffects/

KPT includes an excellent lightning generator in its "KPT Effects" pluging.

Attached Link: http://www.davrodigital.co.uk/tutorials/lightening/lightening.htm

Here is a link with a tutorial uising only layer styles. http://www.davrodigital.co.uk/tutorials/lightening/lightening.htm Hope this helps you

The plugin I was talking about was by MuRa (Cloud v 2.2) but instead of doing lightning, it was spark, I was thinking of (but it's free if you want to search around for it).

a plugin that seems to work after a fashion.

the above link is dead This links ok though: http://www.mways.co.uk/prog/plugin.php

OOPs sorry bonestructure I realized you were refering to this app after I posted. - I'll leave it up as the link is more direct.