Really nice work man! The only thing I notice is that the lightning has a little too much “purple” in it, but I only say that after looking that picture over meticulously. Congrats!
…now if I can only finish up that After Effects tutorial… 
Very nice tutorial, man! Has been very helpful. But Im also realy interested in your After Effects tutorial. Hows the status on that one ?! I’m a real noob with After Effects so I could use a good tutorial. The few I found on the web weren’t that useful so I’m looking forward at yours!
Ltr!
I never really started working on it to be honest. School started to get in full swing and engineering isn’t as easy as I thought it would be.
If I find the time I can try and make one up. All it really consists of is making a layer, adding a beam, anchoring the beam to the tip of the wand, then applying a glow and wave filter to it. If you mess around long enough you can figure it out (it’s almost the same as the Photoshop tutorial).
Glad I could help you out!
Allright, no probs. I’ll mess around a bit and see if I can get some results.
Just another question regarding this photoshop tutorial. When I add the omni light type, parts of my images always get over-exposed. Is there away to prevent this? Also where do you put the light, directly on the flarepoint of the gun or behind it on the person who is holding the gun?
Cheers!
I remembered something after doing this…
I have lightning brushes…
That’s awesome! Are those lightning brushes readily available online?
I did one more of my little bro some time ago… I like this one more than my first attempt, but the lightning always gives me trouble. I can never seem to draw it to look like lightning so I wind up stealing the lightning from the OP’s beam tutorial & I use the transform tool to fit it to my beam.
Before:
After:
An interesting note: If you look at the photos of my brother in the BEFORE pics above (i’ll repost the first one below) there is actually a little “orb” that some people associate with spirit/ghost activity. Can’t say i believe the same thing, but I thought it was interesting that they appeared while he was wearing his Ghostbusters costume. :whatever:
Edit: Thank you for the tip on the lens flare, Protonguy! I missed your response before. 
I only caught it by reading back.
Holy moley!
I hope I’m not necroposting but this is absolutely fantastic!! Thank you so much for sharing this … Its stunningly accurate and just wins in all accounts. It’ll also make my life a bit easier when trying to do the beams.
Thanks again!
Glad to have helped!
Cole,
Great tutorial!!!
Here’s a link that I use for brushes: Obsidiandawn.com
Here’s some lightning brushes to ease the burden
http://www.obsidiandawn.com/lightning-photoshop-gimp-brushes
http://www.obsidiandawn.com/lightning-ii-photoshop-gimp-brushes
Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t get this to work in CS4. What were you using here?
I thought I would try spicing up the dull action of this image:
Laaaaame.
What’s the problem? I just finished using this tutorial using CS4 10 minutes ago. Turned out great.
Maybe it’s because I haven’t used Photoshop in ages that I am having difficulties. I’ll give her another go tonight.
This reminds me of this one time I was posting in a 3D modeling forum and people were using all kinds of cheap programs to render a movie quality blade.
So I popped in and said:
“Guys, if you want to render a light saber blade that looks like the ones in the new movies, you might want to try using the same software they use in movies.”
So I posted a Maya render next to the original for comparison and they were like… “Damn it… (¬_¬)”
Good times 
I’m still new to photoshop, but I was giving this a go. Everytime I have made the line and angled it (ctrl-T) it won’t let me open Hue/Saturation under adjustments. It shows nothing available to open except variations.
My copy of PS is Adobe PS CS3 extended.
I have trouble getting the Hue/Saturation to work to color the beam. Any tips. And also I cannot get my lightning to look like lightning any tips on the color sceme?
Nevermind. I got everything going pretty good.