How To Create A Lightsaber In Photoshop

Hi, my name is Tom. I'm an edit assistant and a graphic designer. I am going to show you how to create a lightsaber effect in Adobe Photoshop.

Here, I have one that I made earlier. This is Darth Vader's red bladed lightsaber. In this tutorial, I am actually going to make the green lightsaber that Luke Skywalker had, for you Star Wars nerds out there.

I went on the Internet and borrowed a handle picture. I just typed into Google, "lightsaber handle" and you can find one. Now, I am going to create the basic shape of the lightsaber blade.

To do that, I am going to use the rounded rectangle vector tool which you can find on the left hand side of Photoshop in the tool palette there. If you come to the settings along the top, it might be set as the pen. If you scroll across, you will find the rounded rectangle tool there.

Now, using this, you can change the radius of the rectangle. If I draw one up for example there, you will see that the edges aren't very rounded. If we change the radius to forty and just experiment, you can see that we have got a slightly better more lightsabery-esque type shape.

What I am going to do is I am going to set my color to white because we are on a black image and I am just going to draw a very basic lightsaber shaped blade. There we go. And now I'm going to place that underneath the handle there to almost give it the effect that it's coming out of the handle, we'll sort that out probably later on.

In order to manipulate the lightsaber blade, I need to rasterize the shape. To do that, you right click on the vector shape you have drawn here like so and then click "Rasterize Layer". Once we have rasterized this shape here, we're going to make the outer glow for the lightsaber effect created around the outside of this shape here.

In order to do that, we are going to go to Filter at the top of your Photoshop options here, go down to Blur, and we're going to use Motion Blur. The settings of this need to be at a ninety degree angle so the blur is vertical because any other way it's just not going to work; it's not going to look good. You set that to ninety and then the distance is entirely up to you.

To do a slightly bigger blur or a bigger blur, I am going to set it to around sixty, maybe seventy, let's go with seventy. Just hit 'ok' there. As you can see now, we are getting more and more like a lightsaber-esque type blade.

If I right click on the shape, you can now select the Blending Options. Alright. The blending option that you want to manipulate right now is the Outer Glow.

If we select that, we can see now that we have got this sort of yellowy color. If we click on the Outer Glow word, you bring up the new options. For starters, we are going to change the color just so that it is easier to work with.

We are going to change it to a green obviously because we are doing it like Luke Skywalker's lightsaber. You need to keep the blend mode as the screen. Just put the slider up slightly, so you can get more of an illusion of the blur and then I am just going to increase the size ever so slightly so it gives you that more kind of vibrant vibe that the lightsaber blade gives off.

It should like something along the lines of that. As you can see here we have got the basic outer glow setting. What we are going to do now is slightly manipulate the internal glow of our shape.

If I click on the Inner Glow option there, I have got my Blend Mode set to normal. Opacity a hundred percent. As you can see if you move up and down you can change the opacity of it.

You can choose to drop it to about seventy. The color green is the same green as I had on the outer glow with the technique as Softer and the Source on the Edge. If we move the Checks up and down, you can see that we just lose the white glow, so if you keep that as zero and adjust the size ever so slightly, we can make the white seem a little less harsh on the eye.