Open up a new document

Choose the your foreground color as a navy blue and your background as white on your color palette

Apply Filter>Render>Clouds

Now apply Filter>Render>Difference Clouds

Go to Image>Adjustments>Levels

Choose the middle triangle handle under what looks kinda like a graph and drag it to the left to the thickness of the lightning desired

Now go to Image>Adjustments>Invert

Whuala you have created lightning

I apologize, I didn't realize someone else posted something similar to this so I'll change it up a bit.

Open up a new document

Make your foreground color whatever you want as a main color (use a darker color) and your background color white in your color palette

Apply Filter>Render>Clouds

Copy layer and apply Filter>Render>Difference Clouds

On copied layer, go to Image>Adjustments>Levels and drag the middle one to the desired thickness of lightning and go to Image>Adjustments>Invert

Copy that copied layer and go to Filter>Pixelate>Mosaic and choose cell size 16

To that same layer, apply Filter>Brush Strokes>Accented Edges and choose 3 edge width,40 edge brightness ,and 4 for smoothness

Change the blending mode on that layer to Overlay and merge that layer with the first copied layer

Now change the blending mode on the layer you just merged to Overlay

Merge this layer with the original layer

Now go to Image>Adjustments>Level and move the far left triangle handle to 100 (or whatever suits you)


Mess around with this stuff, its fun and you can come up with your own crazy creations for background art and such.

Since I don't know which way this board lets you post a pic so I'll just post a link http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v145/red...ghtningcopy.jpg

Thats a really cool background effect I like it alot. I did the second one by the way.

wow, that's pretty neat! I knew about the lightening thing, but i never would have thought to do the pixel thing ontop! The effect is awesome!

thanx 4 the cool how-to

lol, that's pretty cool. Amazing what Photoshop can produce from scratch. Well, than again, it's probably even more amazing what it can produce editing images ^_^

But nevertheless, that's a nice lightning effect. Good job on the tutorial

VERY nice! I love learning new things to do in PS because I'm still kind of new to it.

Thank you for that

thats really cool
and good to know since I suck at PS

pictures please, more helpful

^^Yes, a couple pics would be nice. Nice tutorial! I have seen many ways of doing lightning, but none that do it starting from scratch. As a veteran PS user I nearly always end up with a background that looks very similar to one I have already used, but this... I have never done it this way before! Nice job!

Another brilliant tutorial,
thanks mate