First off, let me state that to get a movie accurate beam, you need to practice and practice some more. I did my first beam back in 2002 in Microsoft Paint and it looked like silly string. Photoshop takes some getting used to so don’t expect to achieve movie quality effects the first time. That being said, let’s get this show on the road…
Start off in Photoshop with the picture you are wanting to manipulate. In this tutorial, I chose to use a screen shot from the movie itself.
First, make a new layer and draw a straight line originating at the tip of the wand as so…
Next, press Crtl-T to rotate the beam to face the direction the wand is facing.
Now, go to Image - Adjustments - Hue/Saturation. From there, select Colorize, and move the sliders around until you are able to change the color of the beam. You can also go to Layer - Layer Styles - Color Overlay and select the color that way…
From here, we need to duplicate the layer and apply a Gaussian Blur to each. The layer underneath has two noticeable differences: it is a slightly darker orange and has a larger blur radius…
You now need to add the glow around the beam. To do this, select the lower layer, go to Layer - Layer Styles - Outer Glow. Change the color to a dark orange, and change the blending option to Normal. Also move the spread and size sliders to make the glow larger like the one shown…
Now is where it gets a little harder. There are two parts to the lightning. There are the bolts that circle closely to the beam itself, and then the bolts that shoot out farther away. To make the closer ones, take a white brush on a new layer and start to make jagged lines around the beam. Once that’s done, apply a blur to it and you should get something like this…
Apply a outer glow to that layer to make them stand out more. Next we have to do the larger bolts. Again, you will have to draw these on a new layer by free hand. Once drawn, you should apply a glow to this layer…
Almost done!
We now need to add the lens flare to the picture. For this, make a layer on top of all the other ones, select a white color with a yellow tint to it. Make the brush size a large one and just plop down one click. Apply and blur yet again. You should now have this…
The very last step is a critical one. This is how you make the picture seem believable. Select your original picture layer and go to Filter - Render - Lighting Effects. Select Omni as the light type and change the color to that of your lens flare. Make the light strong enough to have an effect. YOU’RE DONE! You should now have something that looks like this…
Again, this tutorial was made to give you a start towards making your own beams. You will need to tweak it to meet your own pictures needs. I will hopefully have the .psd file up soon so you can download it and view it for yourself. For now, enjoy!
EDIT: For those of you who want to add more bend to it, here is how to do it. The reason there isn’t much in this example is because Ray doesn’t move his wand much in this scene…
First make sure your beam is pointing in the right direction as stated before. Next, you’ll want to go to Filter - Distort - Wave… You should have a window like this pop up:
Play around with the options (mainly amplitude and wavelength) until your beam gets the desired amount of bend to it…
Hope this helps out!
Cole,
