Hi. This is Marty from Blue Lightning TV.
I'm going to show you how to add lightning to a dark, stormy sky.
This is an update of a tutorial I did many years ago on an early version of Photoshop.
I provided this landscape image of a dark, stormy sky, so you follow along.
Its link is in the description below this video or in my project files.
Before we begin, if you're not already a subscriber to Blue Lightning TV, click that "Subscribe"
button at the lower right corner to let you know as soon as I upload new Photoshop tutorials.
The first step is to make a copy of the image by pressing Ctrl or Cmd + J.
Click the New Layer icon to make a new layer.
Open your Gradient Tool.
If you're foreground and background colors aren't black and white respectively,
press "D" on your keyboard.
At the top, make sure the Linear Gradient icon is active.
Open your gradient presets and click the black and white thumbnail.
Go to the top of your document and press and hold Shift as you drag the tool to the bottom
and release.
Pressing Shift kept the tool perfectly vertical as you dragged it.
Go to Filter, Render and "Difference Clouds".
Invert it by pressing Ctrl or Cmd + I.
Open Levels by pressing Ctrl or Cmd + L. In the Input Shadow field, type in 200
and for the Input Midtones, type in point 24.
Next, we'll isolate the shape of the lightning by brushing black over areas outside of it.
Make a new layer.
Open your Brush Tool and Brush Picker.
Pick a soft, round brush.
We'll adjust the size in a moment.
The Hardness is 0%, the Color is Normal and the Opacity is 100%.
To make your brush bigger or smaller, make sure your CapsLock key is off
and press the right or left bracket key on your keyboard.
Look carefully at your image and locate an area you'd like to use for the lightning.
For now, don't be concerned that it's horizontal - we'll rotate it later.
Brush black over the areas outside the section that you want to use for your lightning.
Open your Lasso Tool and drag it around the shape.
Press Ctrl or Cmd + J to cut and copy it onto its own layer.
Now that we have the lightning shape isolated on its own layer, we can delete the layer below it.
To do this, make the layer active and either drag it to the trash or on later versions,
just press the Delete key.
Make the lightning layer active and change its Blend Mode to Screen.
Press Ctrl or Cmd + T to open your Transform Tool and rotate it.
We want the top of the lightning to be positioned just above this dark cloud
and the bottom of the lightning to be just below the top of the trees.
To stretch or compress the bounding box, go to the top and/or bottom and press and hold
the Shift key as you drag it up or down.
Then, press Enter or Return.
Next, we'll add a slight color cast to the lightning.
Click the Adjustment Layer icon and click "Hue/Saturation".
We want the adjustment layer to affect just the lightning and not the landscape.
Since adjustment layers affect all the layers below them in the Layers panel,
we'll need to clip it or restrict to just the one layer below it.
To do this, click the Clipping Mask icon or press Alt + Ctrl + G on Windows
or Option + Cmd + G on a Mac.
You can also go to Layer and "Create Clipping Mask".
Check "Colorize".
For the Hue, type in: 206 and for the Saturation, type in: 16.
Hide the lightning and make the top landscape layer active.
Press "B" to open back your Brush Tool and make its size 30 pixels.
Brush over the edge of the dark cloud and beyond it.
Press "Q" to revert it into a selection and open your Quick Selection Tool.
Go just below the top of the trees and press and hold Alt or Option as you drag over the
landscape making sure you don't include the clouds.
To check your selection, press "Q" to see it as a quick mask.
Then, revert it back into selection by pressing "Q" again.
Click the Layer Mask icon to make a layer mask of the selection next to the active layer.
Make the lightning layer visible and make the top landscape layer active.
Next, we'll brighten the sky under the dark cloud and add a glow to areas of the lightning.
Invert the foreground and background colors by pressing "x" on your keyboard,
so white is your foreground color.
Press "B" to open back your Brush Tool and change its Blend Mode to "Color Dodge".
Make its opacity: 15%.
Adjust its size and brush under the dark cloud over areas of the lightning.
Since the flash of lightning is illuminating the moisture-laden stormy clouds,
we'll add a subtle, greenish hue under the dark cloud.
Click the foreground color and in the hexadecimal field, type in: 89F730.
Change its Blend Mode to "Color" and its opacity to 10%.
I'll make the brush bigger and brush over the illuminated area.
Lastly, we’ll hide the lightning behind the dark cloud and the trees.
Go to the layer mask and press and hold Alt or Option as you drag a copy of it next to the lightning.
This is Marty from Blue Lightning TV.
Thanks for watching!