Topic: lightning ring

hello,
i am looking for a tutorial or a guide or helpful inmate who describes how to come up with an image like this:



i already managed to get a glowing circle by using an overlay-layer, but how could i do these lightnings?

thanks!



(Edited by GRUMBLE on 01-24-2009 17:25)

this is how I'd do it:

(click for .psd)



1) make the canvas width = 4*heigth
2) draw a straight gradient with black - cold blue - white - cold blue - black
3) play with smudge and different brushes to get the result you want
4) polar coordinates
5) resize to width = heigth

edit: if you want thinner spikes then you can try making the initial canvas width = 8*heigth or more ...

(Edited by Arthurio on 01-24-2009 22:03)

thanks a lot Arthurio!
nice tutorial!

yeah, i'd like the spikes a bit more spikey

Nice work Arthurio

Too time limiting...though hands-on is always better as you can tweak whichever bit you really want to.

For this, though, you want NOISE --- WIND --- POLAR COORDINATES

It's a pretty simple process really...and kind of a goofy old trick (hence the goofy old guy coming back to explain it)



1) Make sure your starting canvas is square.

2) Draw yourself a line however thick you want, down the CENTER of the canvas.

3) Dick with the line however you want, make it thicker, then thinner etc. etc., doesn't matter...just keep it center, and basically straight.

4) Add NOISE

5) Play with FILTER >>> STYLIZE >>> WIND (use both directions to achieve the posted results) as many times as you want for however long you want the spikes.

6) Rotate your spiky line 90 degrees so it's horizontal.

7) FILTER >>> DISTORT >>> POLAR COORDINATES ---Rectangular to Polar

8) do more, blur out, overlay, get your glowiness

(Edited by DarkGarden on 05-23-2009 12:21)

Nice one Peter.

Thanks!

WebShaman | The keenest sorrow (and greatest truth) is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.
- Sophocles

Nice walk through DarkGarden. Adding noise was a great insight, I'd missed that step in my thoughts on how the technique would go. I also thought that running the wind filter in the opposite direction would smudge the effects from the first pass of wind ~couldn't resist~
I do think that the overall effect can be enhanced by a little hands on Liquefy.

Nice Tutorial!

Played around with it some more and realized you can get a very nice spiky effect if you add a radial blur with zoom option.

or you can add any blur you want before the polar coordinates

I have a black square on one layer and my white line on another layer, but when I go to do the Wind filter it is grayed out. I don't have anything selected, I'm on the white line layer, it is an RGB 16bit color image. I'm not sure why it is grayed out. Any ideas?

Not all the filters work on 16bit images. Change to 8bit. Image>Mode>8 bits/channel

Thanks, that did the trick.

I want to play with this and see if I can merge it with the fire effect that Mahjqa did a long time ago and make a burning ring of fire. Johnny Cash FTW!