Full Tutorial - Make the Lightning Bolt Photo Using Gimp

all right so what I want to tell you guys first is essentially how this image was created here's a before and here's the final image let it run through now essentially this was done with as usual a series of layer masks and layer modes but this time we employed a couple of different filters and a couple of different things to create the lightening so again here's here's our before and then our after now what I want to show you guys is the different layers there's quite a few layers and creating this kind of break it down for you a little bit there's a series of layers that lighten up the eyes there and then there's a layer that darkens the eye lightens the eye and then there's a highlight layer that pretty much does nothing but highlights all the areas that need to be highlighted as a result of the the big bright lightening right here and then there's also a layer here that darkens the outer area of the eye this layer here creates some dark shadows around her eyes to kind of exaggerate those eyes a little more as you can see a lot of this is just focused very on very very small details right here this is a pretty big layer that this layer actually darkens key parts of the image essentially everything except for the same areas that I was highlighting in this layer right here so I combined this layer and this layer together to create the darker image and here is an another overlay layer this is what gives everything that bluish tint color this layer here reduces the amount of color so that combined with that creates the resulting image that we want and then we've got a series of five layer groups and each layer group creates a different element in the lightening itself you know first off you've got a layer group containing the the lightening ball and then a couple of lightening bolts on the lightening bolts were in fact made from scratch and in this tutorial in a little bit I'll show you exactly how that was done you know and then these other groups are just more lightning bolts and then this was the last lightning bolt and now we're back to our original so you kind of want to see it build back up we'll go ahead and show everything again dark in color darken then your eye details start to come out and that's it so first up we'll go ahead and start over and show you how we made the lightning bolts okay so I'm going to go ahead and I'm gonna leave this image open because I'm going to be referencing it as I go through so that I make sure I get my settings and get all my colors and everything that I had originally done as close as possible so that you guys can you know get the most effective result cuz you know obviously I did this before I recorded the tutorial but what I what you want to do first is you want to find the image online that you're going to use I use this image here I'm going to link it below this was just found on deviantART and all I do is I just right click on the download image link over here on the right side and click copy link location and then go back to and click file open location and paste and then click open and it will go ahead and download that that image and it will open it up as its own image so there it goes and opening and there we go so just like that we have the full size version of this image which is nice it's it's a good good good image to work with so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to create the streak of lightening that goes up her arm now a little precautionary note the lightning bolt that's on this one is not going to be like the lightning in general on this it's probably going to look a little bit different than the lightning I get on this one and that's just because the lightning is kind of generated at random and you'll see what I mean in a second so if you right-click and you click first we're going to do is we're gonna create a new layer set it the transparency and click OK and click on the blend tool and set it to foreground to background switch over so that your foreground color is white and your background color is black and then drag a gradient all the way across the width of our image and make sure your settings are right so that your opacity actually does what it's supposed to do and let's try that again there we go so you should end up with something like this now just click filters render clouds difference clouds and it's going to pull up this setting here and you're just going to set the detail all the way up to 15 and click OK and it's going to run through and load I'm gonna pause until it's done ok so there we go and you can already kind of see the lightening is this black area just so you know so if we click colors invert what you're gonna see is this white is going to be our lightening but we have to pull it out a little bit better than that so all we have to do is click colors levels and then adjust our levels as we see fit if you don't know much about the color modification tools in there is going to be linked below and that lesson kind of goes over some of these different tools just for your information but as you can see we're just kind of adjusting the levels until we kind of get this this relatively thin streak of lightening and I'm probably gonna actually go with this path I kind of see how where my mouse is going and then I don't know what I'm gonna do down here I'll probably go up this way and back down okay so we'll click OK and then we're going to right click on this layer and click add layer mask and set it to grayscale copy of layer and click Add and what's going to happen is it's going to turn our image into our layer mask so that we have some good transparency now that we have a layer mask on here we don't need this image to look like that so we're going to actually replace it with the color of our lightening which is blue so just select all click on this and then fill it in with blue and now we have the blue lightening effect now of course whenever you are actually looking at lightning it doesn't look blue it actually looks white with blue edges around it so we're going to emulate that in a little bit but for now first we need to fix our lightning so that it's actually just a single streak like what we want so what we're going to do is we're going to get our paintbrush tool out hit the D key to set our colors back to black and white click on our layer mask set the layer set our color to black and just kind of fill in this extra stuff sometimes it helps if you right-click and you click show layer mask so that you're actually looking at the mask instead of the result of the mask so again I'm going to probably go with this pathway so I'm gonna try to try to get rid of as much of this extra stuff as I can probably just gonna switch over let's switch over to a softer brush maybe this one and just kind of get rid of some of this right in here oh yeah we'll cut across that way you don't want to get rid of all of this this smokey stuff because it will actually create the effect that we want and then we'll leave cut that off maybe soften that a little bit zoom out okay getting getting better that looks pretty good let's get rid of this you don't want those floaters they look kind of weird in the image just kind of get rid of that a little bit now if you right-click and you uncheck show layer mask you'll now see that you have a relatively cohesive bolt except for this weird streak here so let's go back and check show layer mask and kind of get rid of that area I mean you don't have to do that I just kind of like having a single bolt I'm not big on the whole spreading out lightening bit I think it looks better for this specific use like this all right so right click on your layer click show layer mask again and there now we kind of have some semblance of a single bolt it kind of zigzags through pretty wickedly here and what we'll do is whenever we actually we're gonna actually take this and stretch it and put it on her arm here all the way up it and then we'll probably change our layer mask a little bit to make it look like it goes behind the arm and back in front of the arm so it doesn't look like it's just tacked in front of her arm that's it's just little things like that that makes these images look really really fake so let's get rid of a little bit of that extra smoke ok so I'm pretty happy with that so let's go ahead and work with that so I'm going to pause the video real quick and they add a layer group because my recording software won't let me do it while that plays ok so now that I have a layer group in place we're going to go ahead and position this bolt so that it it's actually on this arm going up it will actually make it look more realistic with the white in the middle after we position it because there's no point in doing this and then positioning it and then because then you're gonna have to delete the layer and re-add it later anyway so to do that all we have to do is first off rotate this bolt so that it's actually heading in the right direction so click on the rotate tool well first click select none because you don't want to have a selection click on the rotate and actually physically rotate the layer group instead of just the layer that way you actually get a better preview and I'm going to hide the layer group that way I can see just my result not the original and just kind of try to get the the general direction of the rotation to match the direction of the arm and that looks pretty good if you look at this line right here you can see it's pretty well down the center of the arm all the way through so that's that's pretty good so just click rotate and once it's done rotating go ahead and turn the layer back on so you can actually see it and then click on come on there we go click on the move tool and just kind of move it over just a little bit and now we're going to have to actually add some perspective distortion to this lightning bolt so it doesn't look so flat we want it to kind of be on the same same plane that this arms on so to do that we're going to use the perspective tool so click on your perspective tool click on your layer group and then click on the actual image and the perspective tool will activate and then again just hide your layer group and we're going to just kind of pull on the four corners of this image and try to match the plane that we're creating with this perspective tool to the arm so I just kind of move the corners around kind of like that maybe maybe like I mean like that maybe like that let's pull this down a little bit because what I'm going to want to do is I'm going to take this lightning bolt and have it go down and then go behind the arm come back go around in front of you maybe we might have that go behind the arm and they have this go up and around the thumb that looks that sounds good so once you're happy with your transformation click transform once you're happy with the result or once it's done just go ahead and turn the layer on and now that our bolts in place we're going to actually start hiding or masking off some of the areas that we don't want to be visible like this area here shouldn't exist because it's gonna technically be behind the arm so we'll get started on that next okay in order to remove this area here all we have to do is edit our existing layer mask with the paintbrush tool so hit the D key to make sure your cut white and black colors are set to the default and click on your paintbrush tool and use a soft brush and the reason why we're using a soft brush is because if you look at the arm the hand itself and much of the arm it's actually out of focus you look at the image itself the camera focused on the body here it didn't focus on the arm which is extended up toward the lens and actually I looked at the settings on the camera for this image and they used a relatively large aperture so as a result of that the the depth of field was pretty small so the hand and all this stuff is pretty out of focus but it's not a big deal it's just we have to make sure that we compensate for that by using a softer brush so just go ahead and start removing this area here here we go and do the same thing down here zoom out I actually kind of overdid it on there so I'm going to undo and try that again and the trick is short brush strokes sometimes I forget to do that myself because if you use long brush strokes you're going to catch yourself in this situation where you got to undo a lot instead of just a little bit there we go that looks pretty good so now it looks like it's going behind the arm and coming up or out now it looks like it's going back down zigzagging and then we're going to have it go back and forth so we need to get rid of this area here right because it's gonna go down up yeah and then it's gonna come out right there let's make your brush small carefully remove some of that zoom out and you see that it's let's show the layer mask so we can see a little clearer yeah so it's going down up through behind the arm out of the arm okay so that does work and we got a little chunks want to get rid of those okay so now the only thing that's weird is it's kind of going over the thumb and it should probably go underneath of the thumb or behind the thumb for that matter so let's go ahead and find the thumb it's pretty out of focus because it's actually the closest feature to you out of everything so that looks good and then just kind of soften up this edge right here because that was the edge of the canvas so we don't want that so with the soft brush just kind of do that and there we go so now we're going to go ahead and actually make this look like lightening so to make the lightning look more realistic we actually need to add the white in the center you know because real lightning actually looks white with a blue edge so to do that all we have to do is right click on our current lightening layer and click duplicate layer because what we're doing is we're essentially just keeping the layer mask and then just replacing this blue color with the color white so I'll click select all click on the bucket tool switch over to the color white and make sure you are set to fill whole selection and fill it in and what it's going to do is it's going to create the white and then the gray areas is going to show the blue edge through and believe it or not that's all it takes but look here there's a little problem here and in order to fix that we have to now change both layer masks which is kind of a nuisance and that's also why I wanted to make sure that you you make your tweaks before you actually reach the point to where you need to do things like that because that's just it's just inconvenient in fact if you're gonna do any major changes I recommend just deleting the layer changing the layer mask duplicating it and redoing that whole process again it's just easier than trying to edit both masks exactly the same ok so there's the first lightning bolt now what we're going to start working on is the rest of the lightning bolts that were actually shooting out of her fingers if you look over on the original one you'll see let me actually turn on all these layers again if you look at the original one you'll see that the her fingers had a couple of lightning bolts shooting out of them and making those it uses a relatively quite a similar process really but I'm going to teach you how to kind of control the direction of the lightning bolt you know our first bolt was pretty much on its own it just kind of made itself randomly and we just kind of worked with it but these smaller ones they need to be much more focused and directed you know this one I told it to curve I showed it where to go same with these ones I told him to curve and then this one in this one so next up I'm going to show you how I did that okay I went ahead and added another layer group in here because again my recording software won't let me move layers around and what-have-you so something else I'm going to do is I'm going to actually kind of start organizing these layers by renaming them so to rename a layer just hit f2 on your keyboard and then just type in what you want to name it I'm going to name this one armed lightning and hit enter and it will commit it and then this one I'm going to name middle finger center finger lightning me and I can't type and then what we're going to do is we're going to actually just create a relatively small layer you know somewhere like this with just a really really small bounding box so that it's a lot easier to manage and in order to figure out how big our layer needs to be I'm just going to click on my rectangle select tool and create a rectangle and just make it about the size of the hand and just think about why that lightning bolt is going to go it's going to go down here right about where the center of your hand is and your palm and essentially go right into the sphere on the final image so it kind of goes out into the sphere so we're just kind of visualizing that and making a rectangle that essentially fits in that as closely as possible and that rectangle is if you click and hold and start dragging you'll notice down here it'll actually show you the size of your box so 656 by 1104 seems to be about right so hit ctrl shift a to deselect all right click and click new layer make the width 656 and make that make the whit number lock there we go make the height 1104 leave it on transparent see and click okay and what that's going to do is it's going to create a layer that is just the size of the hand or the selection that we created before alright so now that we have a layer in place we're going to go ahead and create our layer or create our lightning bolt and this process is essentially the same the only difference is is we're going to create a much smaller line for our gradient and see this this color change right here is what actually makes the lightning ball and the lightning bolt stays within the balance of the color transformation which is exactly what we want so you're just going to kind of click and then release and kind of create a gradient that fits fairly close to that and it is directed in the same way that you want it to go if you can't quite get it right just keep keep messing with it until you figure it out that looks pretty close we can move that and work with it and now all we have to do is click filters and just click repeat difference clouds and it will just redo that same effect again and this time you'll notice the lightning bolt is much more straight than it was before so again just click the colours invert then colors levels and adjust your levels until most of the black in the background is gone or white and the background is gone and you have nothing but your lightning bolt and then just click OK then right click add layer mask grayscale copy of layer and click add just like before and then again we're just going to fill this in with that same color blue that we'd used before make sure you're set to fill a whole selection and fill it in and just like that we have our lightning bolt made we just need to move it around and finalize how it how it looks I guess so we want it to come out of the tip of her finger shooting down that's pretty close and let's go ahead and rotate a little bit so click on the rotate tool and then we're going to actually rotate from the end of the lightning bolt at the top I'm just going to rotate it out just a little bit and then click rotate and that will move it over and now our bolt pretty well is going in the direction that we want it to so we're just gonna finish this up by tweaking the lightning bolt you know get rid of some of this extra crap that we don't want show your layer mask and just kind of brush away with the brush tool get rid of some of those unwanted details and then look here see this this hard edge is going to create a really fake look so click on make your soft brush a little bit bigger and just kind of soften that away and then just do the same thing on the bottom and there's a relatively good chance then whenever we put the ball in here that we're going to probably cut this lightning bolt in half but since we don't know how much we're going to cut it yet we're gonna leave it long so that we don't have to redo it later so just right-click and uncheck the show layer mask option and now we kind of masked off a little bit too much so we're just gonna move this back a little bit and there we go so now just right-click on the layer click duplicate layer and we're just going to fill in this area with a color white again to create our bolt and we're just essentially going to repeat that process on the index finger ring finger and pinky finger well I didn't actually do it on the ring finger or the pinky finger with the other one you could I don't think I'm going to for this tutorial I'm just gonna do another one for the index finger and then the ring finger or I'm sorry the the thumb so to create the index finger lightning I'm going to just right click on my middle finger lightening layer group and click duplicate layer and I'm not actually going to use these layers inside I just simply did that because I can't do it cuz I can't do it otherwise because of my recording software and also I wanted more importantly I wanted to keep this layer bounding box size the same and I didn't want to have to try to remember and type in those numbers again so I'm gonna keep this blue layer here I'm going to delete I deleted the white one and I'm keeping the blue layer so right click on the layer mask and click delete layer mask and then select all on our image and hit the Delete key on your keyboard to remove all of those pixels so now all we're left with is a layer that is the same exact size as our other layer and we're just gonna rename our layer group to index finger lightening copy not a copy and get rid of the word copy there we go and just essentially repeat that process click on the blend tool and try to click on each end of the finger and just try to create a gradient and try did you know the wider you make this the more wild that gradients gonna be so let's try I'm sorry the wider you make that gradient the more wild the lightning bolts gonna be there we go I like that one I think that's going to create a good a good bolt yeah it sounded so dorky okay so click filters repeat difference clouds it'll go through and repeat that process and you can see it's just a little more off than the other one and then click colors invert colors levels and widget what do you know if you click on presets and then you click on the top one on the list it's going to actually reuse the settings that you use last time in this case is the settings that we did for the the middle finger bolt and since it's pretty much gonna end up being the same settings it's at least a good starting point you can at least pull it back and forth to see if you know maybe some slight adjustments need to be made but it's definitely a quick way to you know get that levels setting set and then right-click on your layer and click Add layer mask and set it to grayscale copy of layer click Add click on your actual layer hit select all click on your bucket fill tool fill it in with the color blue and there's your next bolt and for now I'm going to hide the middle finger lightning so that all I have to see is the index finger so right click click show layer mask and matte get rid of this information with your paintbrush tool and the color black and just brush away that extra junk zoom out right click on your layer uncheck your layer mask and there we go we just need to actually position the layer a little better so move it up a little bit and then we show our middle finger and you can kind of see the intersections pretty much where that orb is going to be that lightning ball so that's perfect just click on our paint brush go to our layer mask and just kind of get rid of that extra extra stuff beyond the edge of the finger and then get rid of that hard edge right there okay and then just right click click duplicate layer and fill the duplicated layer in with the color white and just like that we now have two bolts of lightning with a random floating blue piece of the top so let's get rid of that there we go so now you should have an index finger light layer group a middle finger layer group and an arm layer group and then of course the base layer so next up we're going to do the thumb the thumb uses a slightly different process to kind of make it go in an arc instead of straight all right so let's just right click on our index finger lightning and click duplicate layer and again this is for the same purpose as what it was before we're just trying to keep this bounding box the same size so just delete one of those layers and then delete the layer mask and then select all click the Delete key so now all we have is the layer size bounding box now this time let's rename this to thumb like name get rid of the word copy and hit enter okay now this time we're going to make the arc or the lightning actually arc and a curve now if you recall the thing that actually makes the lightning is the whenever you do the difference cloud feature or feature filter the gray area here is what the lightning kind of bounces in so what we're going to do is we're going to kind of create that same tube but instead of a straight motion we're going to create on a rent a circular type motion and to do that all we have to do is change the way our radial or I'm sorry our gradient actually goes we can make it go in a radial and then if we do that what you'll see happen is let's go ahead and just show you really fast it creates a circle actually this time it made a heart it's kind of funny but it'll arc that's the point so if we start right here and we just kind of create that radius that radial blur it'll it'll do that for us now this time it's a little bit tricky because you got to click on the center and go out and you're ultimately defining the radius with which you want you know the light name to travel so you want to kind of set almost do what you did before where you're going on both sides of the finger but you're going to kind of click further up because you want to kind of arc up like that so it's a little tricky to really get it right so that might work let's try that so repeat difference clouds as you can see it really created a pretty wicked arc there and if we decrease our transparency you can kind of see that's actually probably going to do okay but I don't really like the result so let's undo and then click reshow difference clouds and just click new seed and click OK and what will happen is it'll create a different shape and then that one is actually pretty wicked too we can probably have it go like that but I don't think I like that one either so let's try changing the gradient a little bit maybe we'll make it a little bit smaller now click filters repeat difference clouds and as you can see that one didn't work out very well because it kind of went out into four bounding box you know what let's actually right click on this and click layer to image size because that bounding box is actually hindering us more than helping us this time so now our bounding box is the same size as our actual image itself which will allow us to create bigger gradients and coincidentally bigger lightning bolts bigger arcs that is there we go so that one created a pretty good arc I like that one we'll go ahead and go with that now also note that another benefit of keeping the actual layer size smaller means has to process less and it keeps the program running a little bit quicker so you don't have to wait so long as it generates all of this unnecessary information so click colors invert and colors levels and then just click on the preset and then click ok ok so now we just need to get rid of all of this unnecessary stuff so just start coloring in you can you know every other time so far I actually created the layer mask first and then did this on the layer mask but the order doesn't matter you can do this before you create the layer mask and it'll give you the same result so jus min get rid of that little bit of extra junk there zoom out right click click add layer mask grayscale copy a layer and click Add and what it'll do is it will create that at arced radius so now let's select all on our layer click on our bucket fill tool set our color to blue and fill it in now if we just click on our layer group we should be able to just move it in place maybe and that looks pretty good so now it's kind of arc you even make it a little a little lower let's try that and you know you can always go back and tweak this later if you don't like it and now we just need to get rid of the top half of the Ring because we don't need any of this we just need the bottom oh yeah make sure your layer mask is set to black and white right click on it and click show layer mask and we'll just start getting rid of some of this and I stand corrected we actually need to see where the thumb is so maybe something like that zoom in fine-tune that a little bit and you know what our lightning bolt still isn't let's see how it looks if we duplicate the layer and we fill the duplicated layer in with white that looks ok but I think I don't think it's as sharp as I'd like it to be so let's click show layer mask and let's get rid of some of this extra stuff and then click colors level or yeah colors levels again and let's let's pull that out a little further and that looks better right click uncheck show layer mask yeah it looks a lot better and then just kind of get rid of some of this extra stuff here like that that looks pretty good so right click and click duplicate layer select all fill the duplicated color in layer in with the color white with your bucket fill tool just so you know what I was doing there I hit control a for select all shift B for the bucket tool and then clicked and there we go so now we have our all of our lightning pretty well created next up we're going to create the lightning ball that's going to go right here and we're gonna also create a couple of random lightning bolts that are kind of coming out of it if you look in the final image you can see what I'm talking about there's this little bolt here streak here and then this the ball itself right here so the first thing we want to do to create our lightning ball is create another layer group so we're just going to right-click and click new layer group oops let's right-click down here and click new layer group and then move that up to the top and name it lightning ball and then right click and add a new layer and we're just actually let's right-click and click new layer group because the lightning ball layer group is actually going to contain the if you look over here again it actually contains a set of layer groups it contains one for the actual ball one for one of the lightning streaks and another for the other lightning streak so that's all in one group so we're going to do the same thing on this one so we've got a lightning ball layer group and then this is just going to be called ball and then right click and click new layer set it to transparency and click OK and what we're going to do is we're going to create the ball shape in order to do that we're going to use the ellipse select tool and just start drawing a circle and then come down here and check the fixed aspect ratio checkbox and set it to one to one this is your tool options dockable dialog I have mine set over here a lot of people set it over here and by default it's over here on the left side but anyway so once you set it to fixed on a one to one ratio it'll make a perfect circle so just kind of drag it around and just get it in the spot that you want it to be on in for that matter and just for reference let me check see yeah that's that's just about where I had my other one and then hit enter to commit that selection now just click on the hit shift B for the bucket fill tool and we're just going to have that ready for now we're going to actually first right click on our layer and click add layer mask and set it to selection and click Add and what that will do is that will actually turn our layer mask into whatever our selection was so let's uncheck show layer mask and now if we actually fill this in with that color blue that we've been using all along this whole layer by hitting select all I'm filling it in the only part that actually fills in is the part that isn't masked and then you could have one way you could have done this was with the Select tool and then clicking feather selection and creating a feather but I don't like to do that because it doesn't give me quite as much control and it's harder to preview so instead I actually just create a layer mask and then kick filters blur Gaussian blur and it'll essentially feather it the same way so you're just going to feather and again you're you're blurring your layer mask to create that that soft edge it has just kind of blur it until you get something that looks pretty good I like that so let's click OK and what will happen is it'll essentially blur the edges just like that and then all we have to do is right click and click duplicate layer fill in the duplicated layer with the color white and there we go so there's the original one and there's the new one as you can see this one's balls a little bit bigger that's okay we can work with that so next up we're going to create the first lightning arc shape which we're going to actually just use the same process what we did before but you know I've I really I really just don't like how big this ball shape is so first I'm gonna actually make it a little bit smaller by clicking on the scale tool and clicking make sure I'm on the group not just the individual layer I'm just going to kind of scale it down a little bit just to make it a little bit I don't know better cuz you know like the entire arc was missing for the thumb because it was just so big so let's let's try let's try that instead so you click scale tool let it work its magic and Kim's thinking and there we go so now I can move that over a little bit maybe like right there yeah like that okay so now let's create our first lightning arc shape to do that we're going to right click and click or right click on our lightning ball group and click new group we're going to name this r1 and we're just going to repeat the process that we did before of clicking on the gradient sending it to radial right click and click new layer set it to transparency and click OK and we're just gonna try to create a gradient from down here somewhere probably and radius it upward so that it it creates it's got to be a pretty small radius really because it's got to kind of go up and back you know so if I click overlay that'll kind of give me a well note wall if I click if I just turn the opacity down that'll work too ya see that'll probably work it'll probably give me some kind of little circle right here let's try that out and see what it does so I turn your opacity back up click filters render clouds difference clouds make sure it's at 15 I'm gonna put that back down to 0 just for no reason let it render and now that it's rendered we've got ourselves a lightning ball oops but as you can see it's a little bit it's almost too perfect let's see what it looks like if we actually make the adjustments like I guess it's not too bad I mean you'd still get the picture I would think we'll see then if it doesn't look very good we'll tweak it so right-click add layer mask set it to grayscale copy layer click add and then select all bucket fill tool fill it with a color blue and we're gonna actually click on the layer mask and we're just going to mask off this extra stuff because we want it to appear to start behind it and come up to the front so now duplicate the layer fill in the duplicated layer with the color white and yeah that looks way too perfect so let's delete those and try again alright so I ended up deciding that I didn't like how big the lightening ball was so I just did it again and made it a little bit smaller so just so you know so let's go ahead and create a new layer group and what we're gonna do is we're gonna actually create the the bolt that just kind of arcs up and arcs back down into this this ball so we're gonna rename this layer to lightening one and then add a new layer to that layer group just set it to transparency and click OK and we're gonna do a similar method to what we did with this first arc here we're just going to click on the gradient tool set it to radial and then click and drag kind of like that but the problem is is I want to set this group to multiply so that you can kind of see what's going on actually I didn't do what I expected it because it's in a layer group but anyway what's going to happen is it's going to kind of arc out and back not quite like we want it to so we're gonna try to make it a little more interesting by using the scale tool and we're just going to kind of squish this this radius a little bit kind of like that just to kind of make it peak up higher and go back down I'll scale it all right now that it's scaled we'll just go ahead and click filters clouds or render clouds difference clouds set the D make sure the details on 15 and click OK and see how this does okay so it created a pretty interesting shape on the bottom not so much on the top but there's just enough variation in the bottom for it to be worth using so we're going to go ahead and click on the flip tool over here and click vertical and just click and then we'll actually flip our arc upside down so we've got the interesting side on the top which is where we're going to ultimately put this bolt so just click colors invert and then colors levels and then adjust your levels until you get a nice thin bolt there you go click ok right click click add layer mask set at the grayscale copy of layer and click Add select all on your layer fill it in with the color blue just like we've been doing all along and then move it in position so click on your layer group move it up and then you'll notice that it's you know it's gonna arc kind of close to the center so we're gonna I want it to kind of arc a little crooked so I'm gonna actually click on the rotate tool click on the layer group and then click on the center point I can actually change where it's going to rotate about I'm gonna have it rotate about the center of the actual orb itself and then just rotate it and pull it until I'm happy with where it goes I kind of like that so we'll go with that and click rotate and once it's done rotating we can go ahead and finish the the effect by getting rid of some of this extra stuff at the bottom of the loop so just click on your layer mask hit D on your keyboard to reset your colors back to black and white and then just brush away this unwanted portion of the actual lightning and leave a little bit on this side but bring this one all the way up to the edge because what we're doing is we're creating the illusion that is coming from the backside of the lightening ball up and over into the front side now that you have that just right-click and click duplicate layer fill in the duplicated layer with the color white and there you go now the only thing is is your lightnings going to look kind of weird on the end here so you'll want to click on the blue layer mask and get rid of that blue on the edge by phillium the color black just so that it kind of looks like it's fading into the ball not ending on top of it and now we're just gonna go ahead and do that same process again and create another lightning ball or I'm sorry another lightning streak that goes in there into the actual ball and this time I'm going to use a different gradient just so you can kind of see some of the different ways you can create this lightning so our different gradient is actually going to be the radial mode but this time we're going to set it to triangular wave and you'll see so we're gonna click right click on our lightning ball group and click new layer group set it to lightning to right click on it add a new layer and click OK make sure your gradient is black and white or your colors are black and white click on your gradient tool and then just create a gradient kind of like that so start here in the middle and just try and keep it kind of small and you guys so now you've got this nice symmetric shape there so with that we're gonna go ahead and click repeat differents clouds and it will go through and create that effect ok so and then we just click colors invert colors levels crank up our levels until we get our nice shaped bolt kind of like that click OK and then fill in the rest of the unused parts with a color black because we're not going to use all of these rings we're only going to use the one ring that closest fits the overall shape of our orb and actually I'm just going to go ahead and get the last of 2 I hit the F key on my keyboard and then I'm just kind of going around selecting what I want to keep and then clicking in it color art I'm sorry select invert and then click on your bucket tool right here and fill in everything else with the color black so that gets rid of everything else now right click click add layer masks set it's a gray scale copy of layer and click Add select all and fill the selection with the color blue and now we have our second ring that we're going to use on this image of course it's quite a bit larger than it should be but that's okay we can work with it it's kind of the reason why I did the single radius on the other one just because it's a little bit easier to control this is kind of unpredictable you don't really know how big your radius is going to come out so I'm just going to click on the scale tool here and I'm just scaling it down to a more reasonable size I don't really like that cuz it kinda looks like bunny ears so maybe maybe that that looks well that's all symmetrical there we go right there so you click scale and then now you're just going to click on your layer and get rid of all this extra stuff that we don't want by brushing in the color black on the actual layer and again you're going right on the edge on this side and then this is going to come up and go into the actual ball a little bit right click on the layer and duplicate it and we're going to create our actual white so just create a new layer and fill in the duplicated layer with the color white just like we've been doing all along and then get your layer mask out color I'm black on the blue layer so it kind of fades back into the image and there we go so that sums up how the lightening is is made so from there we're going to go ahead and start creating all of the effects that really generate and create the mood on this image okay to create that mood moody blue color and the really sharp contrast that I created in this image I used a series of two layers and that's what we're going to create next so first just right-click on a layer and click new layer and name this layer blue mood and then move it to the top fill that layer in with a color blue specifically the color I used was this HTML notation here 0:04 f9e if you type that in to this box here it'll give you the exact same color I used so click OK now click on the bucket fill tool which is over here or hit shift B and fill that entire layer with that blue color and then set the layer mode to overlay and there you go that's the first step in creating this moody effect now to create the extra contrast we're going to create a a all black layer that's going to make a lot of this stuff darker so right click and again click new layer and name this one contrast and then fill it in with a color black and set its layer mode to overlay as well and with that you now have as you can see and quick comparison the the contrast that this one has and then last but not least we're going to add one more layer because the problem is is you know this this blue mood layer added a lot of the bluish color to it but it really didn't change some of it as well as I had hoped it would so to fix that we're gonna actually remove some of the color from this image so just right click and click new layer again and name this one color and make sure it's underneath both the blue mood and the contrast layers fill it in with a color black and set its layer mode to color and then pull its opacity back just just a little bit let me check and make sure I'm giving you guys the right information here yeah I actually pulled mine back to about 50% so right about there as you can see now it looks a lot more blue here it is here's what it looked like without that color layer and here's what it looks like with it so it still looks you can still tell there's color in it but it's a lot stronger of it it really strengthens the blue mood effect so next up we're going to focus on pulling some of the the data back in this image you know like a lot of her cloak was lost whenever we added this contrast layer here and there's some information that we want to keep there so if you look back over at original a lot of this is still quite bright so we're gonna we're going to work on adding all of that back into it alright so to do that all we have to do is actually if you look at our finished one right here is that contrast layer that we just created here and all I actually did was if you right-click and you click show layer mask I actually added a layer mask and with my Wacom tablet I actually dictated different parts of the image to be not quite so dark I guess it kind of equalizes it a little bit and I'll show you how I did that all I did was i right clicked on this layer and I clicked add layer mask and then set it to black I'm sorry white full opacity and click add alright so at this point it didn't have any effect on the actual image all it did was just add our layer mask and then I'm using a Wacom tablet which helps me tremendously with this if you don't have one I highly recommend that you get one and I actually have a blog post and I already wrote that it's kind of a little buyer's guide for people so everybody can have an idea as to what the different types are and what the different benefits are of each one and you can go from there if you're curious I actually just have a basic the basic Wacom tablet it's enough for me it does what I need it to do and it does it quite well so you know it's I think it's some under seventy-five dollars to get it so it's not bad anyway back on topic the reason why this is so convenient is because if you right-click on this a new click show layer mask and I start brushing you'll notice that if I push hard it makes it fully black but if I push light it kind of makes it less dark and what that does in my layer mask is it creates different amounts of intensities of light so I can use that to my advantage from to essentially shade the highlights back into this image by just using a soft brush and just kind of coming through and brushing in the color black where I think there needs to be highlight and you just kind of go through and go like that and you'll notice yeah I'm essentially just painting the highlight back into the cup back into the image I'm actually not painting the highlight I'm just removing the the darkness that the overlay layer is created I'm just kind of cutting a color pretty much everything first and then remove it as I see fit and you got to remember now the lighting on this image has got to be a little bit different than it was before because originally it was um intended to be you know without that lightning ball over then the right side of that lightning ball is creating a lot of light so it's really gonna have a pretty strong effect on just how bright this image is overall you know so you got to keep that in mind and account for that so and then once you have everything highlighted just kind of go back switch over to the color white on your layer mask and then just remove some areas where you don't think it's necessarily gonna flash so bright so you know like right in here it's probably not gonna really hit that hard and then maybe just brush it back just a little bit and I'm just hitting the X key on my keyboard to switch between the colors black and white on my layer mask if your coloring in the color white it's gonna get rid of the highlight if your coloring in the color black it's gonna read it so you know it's gonna kind of do that and then something else I'd like to work with is the smudge tool so if you hit S on your keyboard it'll bring up the smudge tool and you can just kind of smudge in areas for highlighting and stuff like that and this is a really really great tool for um for just shading in general really just cuz it all it's doing is it just grabs pixels and it just kind of pulls them so you know it it's just really good try messing just mess with it sometime and really work with it and see see how it can help you okay so that's a pretty good starting point for now I'm just going to focus on the cloak later on we're going to action add some lighting to the arm to actually make it look like the lighting is making the arm brighter in the areas where the lightning actually is so next up if you look over at our original image you can see that I also have a white layer set to the layer mode overlay and we're going to essentially do the same thing so if you right click on this layer and click duplicate layer and the reason what we're doing is because we want the same exact layer mask on this one that we had on this one and we're just going to fill it in with the color white this time and what's going to happen is it's going to make all of the areas that we just told the image to make darker get lighter again which is the exact opposite of what we want because what we're trying to do is we're trying to take the parts that we said in our contrast layer you know the parts that we said don't make this part dark leave it light we're trying to tell this part this layer here we're trying to say you know make these parts lighter so we're essentially trying to we want the same exact pixels to be lighter on this layer as what once we told to not be dark on this layer it's kind of hard to word it right but essentially all you need to do is duplicate the layer in click colors and four on the layer mask and it will just further enhance how light the the actual outfit itself is and that will really help pull out a lot of that detail so then from there we can go ahead and probably start working on the eyes or alternatively we can also just start yeah let's start working on the face a little bit so if you zoom in on the face I want to make it a little bit brighter to kind of give it the illusion that you know that lightning is hitting it pretty hard so we're going to kind of just run through and stroke on there a little bit and then switch over to our contrast layer and tell it to brighten up a little then you zoom out see that's of course that's way too bright but that's okay so let's just go back to our brighten layer and pull some of it back a little bit and I'm just kind of creating some even strokes on my layer layer mask with my Wacom tablet there we go and then we're just going to do the same thing on the arm to just kind of zoom in click on your paintbrush and just kind of brush first off go to the contrast layer and brush the color black where the lightening kind of goes along the arm you know and brush extra hard in the areas where the lightening is especially visible because you're wanting it to you know really really pop out and if you brush hard it'll make it extra extra bright and then pretty much the whole hand needs to be bright because the obviously the Lightning is hitting it but now here's something that's interesting what you want to do is you want to try to get the front half of the hand not the back half so right here along this edge try to keep that dark so that it looks like it's being lit by the ball just kind of click make your brush a little smaller fill in that area just kind of repeat that process in between all the different areas of the actual lightening itself you don't want to actually brush the lightening because you don't look the lightening to be brighter and doesn't need to be there you go now if you zoom out you have a pretty convincing look there this could probably soften up a little bit so fix that we're gonna use this smudge tool I think and a lot of the highlighting process is pretty much just kind of you know fine tuning and tweaking and it's just again just like I said earlier with the lightening you spend a lot of the time just looking at it going I I don't like that I like that her hairline you know it's not even here and you know like for example I would just take this much tool when I tweaked that a little bit to kind of make it look a little more uneven and you know it's just it's stuff like that that makes the biggest difference so you know just really take your time and just kind of look at what you think would really make this image look over the top and again coming back to this finger here like I said it just looks a little bit too sharp so we're just going to kind of use the smudge tool and just kind of soften up that edge a little bit just to kind of make it look a little more realistic yeah same with this finger we're just kind of I'm gonna do the same thing onto this layer just kind of smudge some of that I'll shoot we haven't you started painting this with the white layer let's see what that does that might actually make it too bright if it does we can just undo all of this yeah I think it's gonna wash it clean out yeah I don't think I like that so let's undo all that and then click on a paint brush again and just kind of go through here on the white layer and just kind of really add some of this color throughout here and you know what we'll just go ahead add that and I'm just going to make this this white layer globally less visible I'm gonna turn the pasady down a little bit just to kind of make it less intense overall because pretty much everywhere I've gone it's been too much so let's just turn it back a little bit and there we go that looks a little better so yeah now one thing next up we're gonna start working on the eyes and the eyes are kind of you know the first most important thing is if you look at this image the eyes are really really bright I mean I and they look crazy I mean if you zoom in just a little bit on just like one eye and then you compare it to this eye I mean there's a huge difference there that's what really makes in my opinion that's what really makes this image stick out is always it's always the eyes it's always I mean that's just so important so we're gonna work on that next all right so to do the eyes the first thing we want to do is we're going to right click and we're gonna click new layer and we're going to name this layer I lighten lighten a light there we go and we're gonna actually use this to lighten up the eyes overall but before we do that I'm gonna actually click on my contrast layer and make sure that it's not affecting the eyes because you don't want to darken something and then turn around and lighten it again later it's just it's bad practice and the reason why it's bad practice is because telling to process the same pixels twice in opposing directions and it'll it kills the quality of your image so you want to make sure that you know you're only processing what you have to process now that we've done that we'll go ahead and use the eye light and layer and the reason why we're actually and you'll notice that I'm going to fill this layer with the color white and set it to the layer mode overlay which is exactly what I did with my this layer here but the thing is is this layer has its own opacity settings I want the eye lighten layers opacity to be independent of this one and I don't want to have to fiddle around with having to constantly paint different opacities in manually it's much easier to just have this on its own layer so I can just easily control that eyes the eyes brightness individually and you'll see what I mean so let's add a layer mask and set it to black full transparency and click Add so now that effectively removed our second overlay layer that we added and then we're just going to go back with the color white and we're just going to fill in the eye as a whole because we're actually going to lighten the entire eye first and then focus in on the IRS later so first up we'll just do that and then we're gonna zoom all the way out and then we're just gonna adjust the opacity of this layer until it looks okay that's pretty good that's at least a good starting point next up from there if you look back over you'll see that the eyes are actually made up of a series of several several layers let's hide these real quick so first off you've got the layer that whitens the eye as a whole which is the one we just made and then you've got this layer here which creates this crazy star like a look you have a third one that brightens up the stars themselves even further another layer that is what does that one doing okay it's taken too long there it goes oh this is actually lightning the other eye because I actually light not Beach I individually because there they need different settings see so yeah okay and then also something else to note there's actually a layer hidden in my layer listing that actually darkens yeah creates these dark rings around the eye and they actually add a lot of depth to I actually have an in-depth tutorial just on working on eyes and I highly recommend that if you have an irony watched it then you watch it now because it's really useful I'm pretty much going to go over the same information in this tutorial but it's still nice to watch it so the first thing that we want to do is we want to start creating the brightness on the actual iris itself so to do that we're just going to actually right click on our layer and click new layer I just had to I had to check and make sure I was thinking right and then click on the bucket fill tool and fill it in with the color white and set it to overlay and again this is another one of those times what we're kind of we're making this a different layer even though we're doing the same exact thing just simply because we want to keep the opacity bars independent of one another and then just set it to black full transparency and click Add click on your paintbrush tool switch over to the color white and then just kind of color in the iris and then switch over to the color black and get rid of the color from the pupil and then the outer edge just make sure you kind of get rid of you don't want too much color in that center there or the edge and then zoom out and you'll notice that that one eye on the on the right is quite a bit brighter than the one on the left and we're just going to do the same exact thing with a left eye but first let's let's just finish up this I all together and then we'll go from there so now we're gonna right click and add another new layer and again we're gonna fill it in with the color white and set it to the layer mode overlay and I'm gonna close this because I'm starting to get a lot of layers so it's starting to bog down the computer a bit okay so now just right-click and add a layer mask and this time we're gonna add that crazy star look into the eye that really really makes them pop out and to do that it's all in the layer mask so just right-click and click add layer mask set it the black fold transparency and click Add and what we're gonna do is we're gonna actually create this the right pattern that will actually create streaks inside of the eye and if you've already watched the eye making tutorial that I linked below you probably already know what I'm gonna do I'm actually gonna click on the lasso tool here or though it's a free select tool and then I'm just going to click filters noise RGB noise and then crank that up click OK and then hover over the center of the pupil and down here you'll see there's a set of coordinates and you're going to take note of those numbers because we're going to need that in a minute so if you click blur motion blur and set it to zoom you crank up the length a little bit and then you hover over this it says to 870 by 750 so if you set the x at two eight seventy eight and then 750 it's gonna put the center of the pupil as the center point for this blur then you click OK and it creates that that blur that we want the problem is it's not strong enough of an effect so we click colors levels and we're going to crank those levels up or actually down and up until we get at really really crazy high contrast between the two and then click OK and then just get rid of the extra stuff around the outer edge by clicking on our paintbrush tool coloring in the color black around the outer edge and again in short brush strokes is always the way to go just remove all that and then again in the center of the pupil click a couple times to get rid of it in the middle and there you go just like that you've got that really crazy eye look and then last but not least we're going to go ahead and add a darkened layer around the outer edge all right so next up we're just going to go ahead and right click and click new layer and fill it in with the color black Oh make sure you're select none' first and then fill it in with the color black set its layer mode to overlay and then again right click on it and click add layer mask and this is just going to be the black ring along the outside so get your tablet out and just kind of brush the color white on your mask right around that outer edge here's the amount that actually makes a pretty substantial difference in itself and then all we're going to do is you're just going to go over to your other eye and you're just going to essentially do the exact same steps I just did with this eye and from there just fine-tune everything you know tweak all the lighting until you're really happy with how it looks and that's pretty much it so one last time I'm going to open up the final result that I originally did but yeah you know it's much more polished than this one I showed you in the tutorial you'll notice that I kind of tweaked the color on it and a couple other things so yeah that's that's it there's your after and there's your original so I hope this tutorial helped if you have any more questions please leave them in the comment section below I'll be happy to help and thank you for being a member of gimped premium have a good one

Channel: GimpedTutorials

Views: 28,346

Keywords: Tutorial (Media Genre), GIMP (Software), Software (Industry)

Id: JZoDxTG0ngg

Length: 77min 36sec (4656 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 27 2015