These is a quick tutorial on making lightning in Paint Shop Pro. It uses no plugins and on standard Paint Shop Pro features.

Open an image with a background color of black and foreground color white. Add a layer over that and with the paint brush (Size and Step set to 1, Opacity, Density and Hardness set to 100 ) draw a jagged lines for your lightning.

 

Now with the wand select the transparent area of this layer and then Selections | Invert then Selections | Save to Alpha Channel as you will use this again later. Select the black layer and lightning still selected go to Selections | Modify | Feather and set it to 5.

 

Set the foreground color to Red = 192, Green = 0, Blue = 192 then go to Image | Effects | Drop Shadow and set it to Color = Foreground, Opacity = 100, Blur to 30, Horizontal/Vertical to 0. Apply this a few times I did it 4 times on this one.

 

Add another new layer between the black background and the lightning then do Selections | Load From Alpha Channel and get the selection for your lightning. Now Selections | Modify | Expand 2.

 

Set the foreground color to Red = 128, Green = 96, Blue = 192 and flood fill your lightning selection with this blue. Once it is filled do Selections | Invert and then Selections | Modify | Feather 1 and hit the delete key once. Turn down the opacity for this layer down to about 85 and Layers | Merge | Merge Visible.

 

Now add a new layer above this and with the paint brush set to the reddish purple used above set the brush's opacity back to about 70 and the size set to about 13 in this case. Now spray a spot of paint at the top of your lightning on this transparent layer. Turn the brush size back to about 7 and set the foreground color to white and put another spot of white on the purple red spot. Go to Image | Blur | Gaussian Blur and set it to about 4 and apply it. Now merge it all together and pick the retouch tool. Under Tool Control set it to push and Brush Tip set to width 1. Now at the tips just pull then down a few pixels to give it a pointed look. You now have your lightning.

 

This page was last updated on October 11, 2001 by Joe Cilinceon