Last week in my class, Photoshop – The Art of Compositing, we focused on creating various effects in Photoshop. Among the topics were performing non-destructive dodge & burn, taking a daylight composite and converting it to a night shot, and a brief overview of actions and plugins. The last bit of the class was spent creating a lightning strike. Since the class, I’ve gotten several emails asking if I could do a step by step of the effect, since we went through it a bit too quickly in class. Rather than write it out, I did a quick video tutorial of the effect from start to finish. This is a great technique that can be used not only for natural lightning, but also for all sorts of cool, sci fi energy blasts and bolts…We’ll be using this effect again in an upcoming project, so I wanted to make sure it was clear on how to achieve it.

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