I have an image and I want to add a streak of lightning to it. I'm new to Photoshop and any help on ANY different methods of doing this would be appreciated. Also, is there any main Photoshop resource site? I'm using Photoshop 4.0 on a mac.

never mind, I got it. www.actionxchange.com is wonderful!

Hmm, if memory serves me correct, try doing a Render->Clouds , with blue and black i guess. Up the brightness and contrast royalle, and pick a piece of lighting out... dont quote me, photoshop is screy on me at themmoment, so i cant check

You can use a Photoshop plugin called xenofex1.0 It has a lightning feature makes creating lighting patterns real easy. Hope you get on a Streak!!

The xenofex filter arallegro's talking about is okay. But you get random lightning patterns. What I'd do is draw a lightning bolt in the shape ( with a black fill) i like in a vector program like coreldraw, export it as tiff, open it in photoshop, copy it to my target image as a new layer, refill it in he color I want, add blurs, and basically fiddle around with it's opacity and maybe even add new layer copies of it for different effects. Play around with the layer blending options until you get the effect you want. Then, I go in with the dodge and burn tool on the background image to simulate the lightning's light effects on the clouds. It's pretty tedious but this way, you get the exact lightning streak you'd imagine. But then again, if random streaks are what you need, go the simpler route and get xenofex's filter. By rendering it on different layers first, you could probably get a streak that would serve your purpose. hope this could be of help.

Alright hers how you do it. Start with a blank canvis. Use the gradient tool to create a black and white gradient. Click on filter>>render>>diference clouds. at this point press crt + f untill you find a pattern you like (the black bit is where the lightning will show). When your happy with the difference clouds then press crt + i (this inverts the image) then press ctr l (please note that is not a one but an L...) this opens the levels options window. Drag the middel up faceing arrow all the way to the right and you are left with your lightning. All you need to do now is change the colour (optional). Press crt + u (saturation) and in the window that pops up play around with the settings. Click the colorise check box if you want the lightning to be a colour. BTW if you move the saturation window somewhere where it allows you to see your image then you can change the colours in the saturation window and see what affect that it has. Hope this helps... if you have any questions then email me