Gimp Tutorial: How to make Lightning

hey what's up David Wood here for the blend mode dot com and welcome to another very exciting graphic design tutorial in today's tutorial we are going to look at three different techniques that we can use to create lightning inside of Gimp going from an easy technique to a more advanced technique now lightning has been done before there are many tutorials on it and one of the techniques that I show you is from those tutorials but hopefully I can help you guys learn a little bit more about it because a lot other tutorials the cover this method are overdone and they show the exact same thing and don't give you anything new to learn so I'm gonna try to change that now this tutorial is a precursor to an upcoming tutorial that I've had in the works for a while and that is a logo inspired by the TV show the flash if you haven't seen the flash I recommend you check it out it's pretty fun this is the title image that I came up with and it's got this lightning bolt look through it and I wanted to show you how to do this in this tutorial rather than that tutorial so that I can cover more of the advanced techniques and take my time with it is that a feeling like I have to rush to move on with the actual logo design so stay tuned for that tutorial should be out sometime next week if all goes according to plan let's go ahead and get started with this tutorial let's look at real lightning now let me in follows very few rules but there are a couple things we want to keep in mind when we are making in are lightening so here you can see I got Google Images looking up lightning nature and more so these are pretty consistent with the way that you expect latenan to look you've got a main bolts that goes through here and then you've got some branching or forking going on that goes in different directions and stuff and usually it's accompanied by a nice glow and this is the natural way that lightning looks and we're gonna try and keep our lining looking as natural as possible another thing that we're going to look at is also using force lightning now force lightning is the second most requested Star Wars a fact after the lightsaber so I'm not gonna cover exactly how to make it but a couple love guidelines you can follow when you are making it so let's look at a couple examples of bad force lightning just so we can see what we're trying to avoid now this is probably the worst one that comes to mind we see this kid has this handout and he's got this really strange lightening effect going on the doesn't look good at all first of all he's got basically one core that's going out and then immediately branches often spreads around and it doesn't look like force lightning it looks more like natural lightning that you would see in the sky with all the different branches and strains going every which way I mean he doesn't even have this coming off a different fingers looks like it's all coming off one finger so we're gonna try to avoid that and then this example are here this is better here we can see that there are course coming off multiple fingers and it looks better but it's not very good because the cores are very dole they're not brights like you expect lightning to be and they don't have much of a glow so those are two things are gonna try to avoid in this tutorial now before I jump into that let me just show you a good example in a bad example love like mean on what you want to avoid when you're actually making the Lightning so these are too quick images that I put together this is a good example see this guy holding his hand out and the lightning is going in one direction not the band but the actual direction and this is what you want to try to do when you're doing any kind of late in the fact you want to avoid doing in this with it where it looks like it's coming at the camera now you can fake it a little bit you can do kind of like an angled shot and you can get away with using the perspective tool and stuff like that but you really want to avoid head-on shots like this lightning looks best when it's going in your composition from left to right or up and down you really want to avoid this because I will look pretty bad because of the perspective that I had to apply to make it look small down by his hand an enlarger at the bottom the picture so as best you can avoid doing straight on shot angled shots can be good such as in this case with County cue so it can be done but you have to be careful with it you don't want it to look stretched or warped or skewed so that's a bad example that is a good example so let's go ahead and jump right into the first technique that we're going to use and that is using stock images and brushes now a lot of people cringe when they hear the word stock images used especially people that use gipp because they like to try to create all other affects within the program and you can create lightning inside Afghan in some cases though is easier to use brushes or stock images if you can't get the leading to look the way that you want it so I'm not gonna cover using brushes that's pretty self-explanatory I'm gonna talk about using stock images and how to make them usable to work with another image so for this I'm going to choose this lightning stock right here and when you're going through in fine in stock images you want to make sure that you check for usage rights the people put in their descriptions or any requirements they have before you can actually use the stock because you don't want to get in trouble with them later and it's just the nice thing to do to have permission to use their work most the time we'll ask you to link back to whatever you created or they'll ask you to put a link in your description or whatever you created back to the stock image so I'm not going to worry about the high res version and a scanned copy the low quality version and bring this into camp and I want to get leave this lightning I want to cut out the background as much as possible so I'm just going to grab the free Select Tool just draw a rough shape around the sleeping just like that and then I will in for the selection and fill it with black so that way we only see this and then select None so now we have the lane pretty much sold this is really easy from here all we have to do was go two colors d century and check which of these options works best for you you want to get the best contrast out of the picture so lightness it doesn't have a lot to contrast luminosity has better contrast an average has less so will you go with luminosity in this case hit OK and then we'll just go two colours levels and we're just gonna grab the grace letter push that to the right and just like that you can see what it took to all of those lay areas and left us with justice white stroke we might grab the blacks letters push that over a little bit and then grab the white slider push that back just you breaking up the lake itself that looks pretty good succumb like that in there on its own you can use you can then copy it and then you can paste it into a new image and set the blend mode on screen and then you can go about setting up your clothes and stuff now while I'm on the topic glows let's discover that real quick glows you do very similar to lightsabers so if you have your layers tab open if you don't have that open you can find under Windows dockable dialogues layers we can see here is our original image and we can hit duplicate by in set the blend mode to scream and then we can duplicate this two more times now we select the second layer ago two filters blur Goshen blur and with each new layer we're going to increase the amount of Gaussian Blur the initial blur on this we're gonna set to 10 will go to the next one bring geyser blew up again well said this one to around 30 and this final top one this one we will set to you sixty round 67 something like that so there added in nice overall global to our lightning bolt and once you have all over the globe was done just right click and choose merge visible layers or fled image and then from there you can go and color with color balance or color eyes levels were curves I like to use curves because it gives you a grease control over how this actually and looking so that's how you do glows now that you guys know how to do the clothes let's talk about branches and forks those are pretty easy to do as well all you have to do is grab your smudge tool choose an appropriate size brush usually the smaller the better make sure that the size is set correctly zoom into your image and change the rate to somewhere in the nineties so usually around 95 to ninety seven works best and all you have to do is grab a weight section of the Lightning and just drag it out and freehand and it will create new for complaining and adjusting the rate upper down if you put a higher than you can bring out longer strokes and then once you have those branches you can go with an even smaller brush and then stroke of that you can do that as complicated as you want I'm not gonna focus too much more on that that's basically all you have to do if you want to get nice looking branch or for work of a single lightning bolt so that covers the first method of this tutorial very simple using stock images or brushes it's not cheating is okay to do and in some cases it makes your art look more professional in Morwell added so let's move on to the second method which is the most commonly used method so I'm just gonna create 8 default image 640 by 480 and I'm going to slacked my blunt or or the gradient or I'm gonna make sure that my colors are black and white and if they're not click the little icon right here in that will fix that and if everything is the default value in the blends settings we can go head and stroke now this is what a lot of people do when they create this tutorial is still make a very wide stroke across an image like this with the big gray area in the middle and then you go to filters render clouds difference clouds and in here check the randomized 10 is getting a different seed bring the detail up a little bit and then you can play with the X&Y size to however you like figure out what you think looks best and hit OK they can already kinda see with this did these really dark black areas that is where the Lightning Bolt is going to be so for just invert the color and bring up are levels or workers and dark in this up by sliding the blacks later you can see what they did it gave us this lightning bolt seko's crazy and they gave us some separate lightning bolt in here like this that's not a very good looking results we won a little more conformity because this is gonna look terrible you try to put it into a scene especially for trying to do for sleeping so we're going to back it up to that gradient and is still have this big wide gradient we're gonna choose a smaller stroke in the middle because the difference clouds affects this gray area through the middle so instead will grab from there to about their and this also works if you do a gradient left to right I like to do it up and down but we want a gradient looks kinda like that in the middle now for just quickly run the difference close again you can see now we've got more of a singular lightning bolt through the middle here this dark black so before we fly the difference clouds and we just have a gradient here we're going to go to filters distorts ripple and what ripple does it as waves to the image don't get this confused with the wave plugin its backwards but for some reason the ripple plugin creates waves and the waves plugin creates ripples as in like dropping a stone into water and having the circular displacement so don't get the two of them mixed up ripple will give us these waves and we're gonna go into are settings and I'm just gonna bump up the amplitudes you can see where is going to happen change the settings and set the orientation from horizontal to vertical minority can see what they did it created these waves up and down in the image and with that amplitude so high you can really see what the result looks like now we want to make sure that we check the smear options for the edges because otherwise the image will wrap-around and we don't want that and we will take the period and the period controls how wide these waves are so we're gonna bump that up you see in this case menus around 170 can lower the amplitude because like I said I was just through exaggerated I'm gonna set that around 20 so we have a nice smooth wave in a minute okay now if we go back into our filters and choose difference clouds and I'm just going to you change the wise mind to make it look a little better and hit OK now you can see that we have a little bit more a wave to are lightening effect okay now we can go to your colors inverted bring upper levels will push the black slider over and then we'll push this gray slider over and we want to get rid of as much of this cloud-like texture around because it really looks terrible once you start adding the clothes we just want to have a solid core so will push that over bring Blacktown more and if we take this value right here for the way slower than a little bit you can see it thickens that corn mix brighter so probably read about their looks pretty good maybe a little bit more and crush the blacks little bit more area and hit OK now if you look closely you'll see that there are some colors that got in here from the levels so go two colors the century doesn't matter which option he said there and that was just remove those colors and now we basically have this one single thick core that looks much better but how can we make this look even better well to start with will create a new layer doesn't matter if it's got a color transparent will go to filters render clouds solid noise and solid noise is basically the exact same thing as difference clouds accept it will not create that lightning look and in here we want to make sure that rx online values are set up so that these clouds appear kind of square we don't want them to look too long or too short we want them to have a rather uniform square look to them tell it's pretty good that okay you can see what it looks like we don't actually need the Sun so we'll just turn that layer of now go back this layer and they will go to filters map displaced so in the displace options you can kinda see it already warping image a little bit was to set this to 0 trouble for these values and the cloud layer is selected for both of them now the ex displacement affects that long the x-axis so left and right if we turn it up it will the story to the left and to the right and we can also pick a negative value if we won no we're not replace this too high we're going to keep this value pretty well because we want to focus on the why displacement which is the y-axis so up and down so around 10 more work either negative or positive and this can affect the just a little bit and then the Y displacement we can set the higher to round 30 or 40 depending on the image this looks pretty good I don't like what it does right here that looks really so I'm going to try a negative your right there to something really strange so that's too much so on this particular lightning bolt I'm not going to use too much displacement keep pretty late so does Orpik mess it up so something like that any settings will change depending on the size of your image and the cloud layer using but in my case native 10:05 is gonna look okay and it's just gonna work it just a little bit not too much but it will just kind of break it up and make it look more natural and less like the defaults result that you get from this method now that that's done we go ahead and add the branching and stuff like that and basically you are done with this method so that's it for method number two we're now ready to move on to method number three now this is based on a Photoshop tutorial very very cool Photoshop tutorial you can see the results here and this tutorial has kinda been buried way back in the Internet but it's still very relevant and its easy to create in game as well and I might even turn it into a video tutorial we'll see how that goes but for now let's just get this into Kim so I'm going to use this image that we've already got just to lead the cloud layer and then fill our background with black now we need to just do is select the free select all and what we'll do is from left to right and from left to right click and drag and just do this rough freehand like when we were adding the branches onto the other lightning bolt now before like go we're going to drag around the outside over the image so that when we connected back here we have the cricket line and then we'll have three straight lines for the sides in the bottom over image and now we can zoom in here and see how that works we see some jagged edges looks pretty good we're gonna make it look even better now camp as a really cool plugin for the selections called distort and what it does is it will actually distort the selection line so doesn't distort the selection itself but it distorts that outer line that makes up the selection so that's going to be under select distort and in here we've got a couple different settings threshold is basically the same thing as the shrink and grow options that you will find under the Select menu if you make the threshold a smaller value you're going to grow the selection and if you make it a higher value you will shrink the selection so we're gonna leave that along we don't have to touch that now the spread is how much distortion is actually applied now for this from when I was testing it this size image eight works fine we don't have to change that at all the granularity is the actual displacement Norway's size so let's just demonstrate their real quick if I make this smaller I'm gonna put on one I'm gonna unchecked the smooth check boxes for now just so you guys can see this and okay and there you can see what'd no took are straight line and it distorted it on a very small scale and that made it very very check it very bumpy and there's a couple places where we end up with little loops like this and this and thats way too much for this image we don't want to do that so instead if we go back into our distort options we're gonna put that back on four and then recheck these boxes and hit okay now ran and if we look at what it looked like before because he hears the original here it is with that distortion and you can see just kinda broke that up a little bit more change the shape that looks pretty good might make a little bit of adjustment something to bring that up again I'm gonna lower the smooth I'm going to increase the spread a little bit and then threshold and is going to raised it okay are at this is looking pretty good now what's shake things up a little bit more now for this to work you need to have the pads dialog box open so if you don't have that open don't panic I'll show you where it is you go under Windows dockable dialogues paths and that will open up this wendover here in at the bottom of the dialog box you'll see this little button that says selection to path and if we hold down the shift key it brings up advanced options so if we hold down the shift button and click on that it will bring up this window with lots of little sliders and values and it can look pretty confusing but don't worry we only need to change to move the sliders that is the filter percent and the filter Absalon those are the only two we need to worry about everything else we can leave alone now exactly what these two mean I don't no but what I do know is what the result is and by adjusting the to have these we just how closely the path is going to follow our selection here so the filter Absalon we will lower that all the way 25 and the filter percent usually between like 10 and point all one is where we want to set this if we set this too low if a quickly do this is that sometimes we will end up with points like this right here which is probably hard for you guys to see but the path that was created actually loops there's another corner where looks around and sometimes they can be really really J getting out of place there's another one so we don't wanna set that value too low very important because otherwise you will get these really weird corners and loops do not look right I'm going to you undue at Garrett that PAF and bring up those options again so filter percent we can set that around you were gonna try points 0 7 okay and then click allied to make our path visible and go hadn't looked at and that looks pretty good if I was a pretty good and we don't see any of those weird edges so we should be all set for that so let's go ahead and double-click an hour path here and that will change our cursor to the pen tool or the pads to all and you'll see these anchor points appear on our image and these allow us to change this line can move a point around and you can move these little handles here and that will affect the angle so now we have to get ready these outer lines here so to do that will come over to this corner and zoom in double click on our path again and you'll notice that when I put my cursor over lime that that little square next to the actual a row turns into a four-sided a row showing that you can move it so you can move the point as I said already or you can move full line and if we hold down Control that watching 22 a plus sign meaning we can go through and we can add points like this we don't want to add them we want to delete them so hold down Control or commander Mak and also shift and that will change it to a minus sign in the minus sign allows us to delete points and delete lines so I mean its lead this points right here and as you can see this line is still connected it's just that point that it was a test he was gone but if we click on the line while holding down shift and control we actually delete that line between the points so we break that bond now if we go through and we delete the points so now on their and go down to the bottom early this one over the other side tweet this one and then come back up here and delete this one and this one and then choose a different tool now we just have this line we don't have it connected all the way around now what I'm gonna do is go back to our layer so go back to the layer tab and I'm going to select the people brush tool and I'm going to select a small hard-edged brush so the last time that I did this the circle 03 worked make sure the size is set correctly and painting with white I'm just gonna draw a line next to it just make sure that the size is correct that looks pretty good so now a brush is all set up so that we will have a consistent core size across the Lightning but what if we want one and two fade away like natural lightning does let's go back to our pictures %uh natural lightning and look at it so we can copy the effect better and you can see that in some of these cases the bolt will shrink as it goes along in if we want to copy that insider this we need to set up the brush dynamics so with a paintbrush tab open sorry but my paper staff get called off the actual toolbox and I can't put it back on I'm recording we want to go into the brush dynamics and the brush dynamics allow us to affect the shape the size and color and opacity the brush stuff like when you click on this icon here and we're going to choose fayed tapering if I go back to a larger brush and I stroke seekers can see what's happening you can see that we're a storage the brush was very small and then it got larger and went the normal size so we want to reverse this a fax already starts out normally and then shrinks down now underneath the presets there is a drop down menu so we'll go ahead and click on that and this gives us options for the fayed we can click the reverse option first because what this will do is it starts out big and it will get smaller and then the fayed links that's measure in pixels so this comp is 640 pixels wide but we can't just make this 640 pixels because it's not a straight line so that ads pickles to it so instead we're gonna set the length about twice as much and hopefully that's enough so I ended up setting it to 1200 so with our paper set up that way I'm painting with white we're going to go to edit stroke path and in here we want to make sure that instead of stroke line we stroke with a paint tour because otherwise we won't be able to use those brush dynamics that we set up so we're using a paintbrush make sure they're emulate brush dynamics is on hit stroke I'd path there we go that looks pretty good get the line going across and and over here where should just like that perfect so now we will create a new layer and we will put some solid noise clouds back on this I mean lower the X&Y size on these hit okay turn it wear off we don't need to look at it go back to the Lightning filters map displace make churches in the cloud layer and we can leave the settings as they were before or we can try changing it up so in this case going to increase that why displacement and we're not using very high values because we want this line to be smooth airline it looks pretty good it okay now this line is basically done now if you want to make a bowl that does not fade off on one end bingo and run the stroke path again and two stroke line changed with two however you like it and then inline style make sure the cap style is set to round and hit stroke that all you need to do and you will have a ball that doesn't fade away so there you have it method number three which is my favorite and you're also done with this tutorial so be sure as you're following along with this tutorial that you experiment with the messages that I've taught you don't be afraid to make mistakes that's why there's an Undo button if you guys use any of my tutorials in your own work send me a link like to check out what you guys have done and before ago just want to remind you guys I have a five yr account if you guys want graphic design work done and stuff my haven't really promoted this too much so here I am promoting it so that's five yr dot com slash David what affects c2 the different gig that I've got up there currently have got more planned one last thing before I go make sure that you subscribe to the mailing list on the blend mode dot com that mailing list will email you whenever I release a new tutorial or a new project file so you won't miss anything you also get tutorials a week in advance compared to YouTube subscribers so that is all I have to say hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial had fun with it my name is David Wood for the one more dot com don't forget to check out the Flash tutorial when that comes out next week and I will see you guys next time a home and

Channel: DavidWoodFX

Views: 51,587

Keywords: best gimp lightning tutorial, ultimate lightning toturla, best photoshop lightning tutorial, gimp, lightning, tutorial, force lightning tutorial, gimp force lightning tutorial, lightning brushes, how to use gimp, Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop (Software), GIMP (Software), graphic design, photoshop lightning, gimp lightning, gimp lightning tutorial

Id: 8O33xx5XSoE

Length: 33min 41sec (2021 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 03 2015