Lightsabers

I’ve seen a lot of Star Wars fans take pictures of themselves holding lightsabers, then digitally making the lightsabers glow. One site that has a lot of that is http://www.thankyougeorge.com/index/photos/. Being an SW fan, too, I naturally have the urge to try this out… But how… So I went off experimenting in PS and I came up with this!

1) Take a picture of yourself holding a lightsaber, or just the lightsaber on the ground like I did, and open it up in PS. I won’t guide you on how to do that.

2) Select White as the foreground color. Click Layer>New>Layers… And under mode select Screen, and be sure to click Fill with Screen-neutral color (black).

3) Select the line tool, and change the weight at the top. For mine, I’ll go for about 10. You’ll see why in a second.

4) Draw the line on the new layer on top of the lightsaber’s plastic blade. Yours should look somewhat like this now:

(Note: It doesnt matter if a little bit of the plastic blade is showing.)

5) Round off the blade’s tip with the Eraser tool. It doesnt have to be perfect. Here’s Mine:

6) Click Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur, and make it at a 1.0 radius. See? The tip looks much better now, and so does the rest of the blade.

7) Click Layer>Duplicate Layer, and leave it at the default settings. Do this three times.

For the next few steps, you’ll need to refer to this screenshot to know which layer is which.

8) Ignore the 1st layer for now, but on the 2nd, add a Gaussian Blur of 10; The weight you picked for the line on step 3.

9) On the 3rd layer, add a Gaussian Blur of the number you picked on step 3, times 2; 20.

10) On the 4th layer, add a Gaussian Blur of.. You guessed it, 30.

11) Now, select the 1st layer and press CTRL+E 3 times. (If you’re on a mac, merge the layers down three times.)

12) For the color of the blade, click Image>Adjustments>Color Balance…

13) Click Midtones, and set +100 to the color you want your blade to be

Here I’ve pointed out what midtones and highlights are.

14) Select Highlights, and set +75 to the color you chose in step 13.

Congratulations, Jedi Master 127.0.0.1, you made your own lightsaber!
(Now, there are different ways that the blades can come out with this same effect. It all depends on your blade’s weight and the quality of the picture.)

Here’s how mine turned out: