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Last summer, my wife and I went to Los Angels to see my uncle. One afternoon, his wife Jennie and my wife went shopping. And Uncle Bog was taking a nap. So I was watching TV. Actually, I was watching weather news. Well, the weather man was saying it would be sunny all day. Wait, sunny? By the way, the weather man looked like Nicolas Cage.

The following tutorial shows steps to illustrate lightning bolts in the sky. It’s easy to design lightnings, using Adobe Photoshop CS2. In fact, we have done it before. (REF: Adobe Photoshop Creative Design #4: A Stormy Day). But such simple lightnings are unrealistic because lightning bolts are not branching out. This time, we use a Photoshop plug-in called Eye Candy 5: Textures from Alien Skin Software. By the way, this plug-in also runs with Adobe Fireworks.

The photo used in this tutorial comes from PD Photo.

1. Let’s make the sky a little darker, first. Grab Rectangular Marquee Tool to make a selection. If necessary, place a layer mask and apply black & white gradient colors vertically.
2. After creating a new layer, choose Marble from Eye Candy 5: Textures. There is no need to fill the selection with a color.
3. Pick white and black for Bedrock Color and Vein Color, respectively. Move the sliders of Feature Size and Coverage nearly all the way to the right. If you don’t get the right design, click on Random Seed.
4. Repeat the last step to design a few lightning bolts. When finished, combine layers by selecting Merge Layers in the Layer Palette.
5. Select Adjustments > Invert.
6. Finally, change the blend mode to Screen.

Video tutorial with no audio commentary

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Photoshop CS2 is a product of Adobe Systems Incorporated.
Eye Candy 5: Textures is a product of Alien Skin Software, LLC.