Add lightning to your photo
Description
Adding lighting sound a bit hard but definitely is not. Check.
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Add lightning to a photo
1. Open background picture. Something rather darker would be more preferable because the effect will not look nice on the light background.
2. Copy lighning you made by tutorial Lightning effect.
3. Chose suitable part of the lighning and rotate it to suitable position. If you did the previous effect (Lightning effect) on a picture with higher resolution, you can afford enlarging the bolts.
4. Use Eraser tool with soft tip to erase all unnecessary parts, such as other bolts or blue thingies between the bolts. None of these are desirable so just erase them, but softly.
The next thing to do is to swich the layer mode to screen.
What does it mean? Well, the screen mode basicaly means that the picture in this mode will interact with the other picture under it in one specific way. And that is that it will lightne all the parts of the underlying picture that are darker than the same parts in the upper picture. Clear, isnt it ? If not, just ask (comments section in the bottom).
The scene is nice but not finished yet. In fact, the original photo is not dark enough so we will change its color a bit to give it more STORMY look.
5. Layer/New Adjustment Layer/Hue saturation (Colorize, 227, 25, -28), click on white layer mask left to the layer, use black brush to cover mountain and leave white for the sky.
6. Decrease opacity of lightning to 85%.
Looks better, doesnt it ?
So what now. To remove the thingies surrounding actual bolts, use the following:
7. Image/Adjustments/Levels
Thats it. Was it that hard? Definitely not and it looks realistic. A bit.
Enjoy.