Tutorial: How to create electric beams in Photoshop

Posted by Sipi Sagar on Jun 15, 2010

In this tutorial we are going to see how to create electric beams in Photoshop from scratch. These electric beams will be very much useful in creating any music or party posters like this one.

Preview

Step 1: Open the document

Open a new document with black background of any size and make sure that the foreground and background colours are set to white and black respectively.

Step 2: Drawing the electric beams

Now choose a circular basic brush of hardness 0% and diameter 1-3 pox whichever size you desire. Now take the pen tool and draw a curve something similar to this or in any way you like in a new layer but make sure that the curve exceeds the border of the document.

Step 3: Stroking the path

Now with the pen tool still selected right click and choose stroke path from the pop up menu. Now a dialog box opens up and choose brush from the drop down box in the dialog box and make sure that the simulate pressure check box is checked. After that press esc 2 times.

Now you must be getting something like this.

Step 4: Applying layer styles

Apply outer glow and inner glow with any colour you desire with its default values but make sure that you apply the same colour for both the layer styles and now reduce the fill to 0%. Now you must get something like this.

Step 5: Distort the stroke

Now got Filter-> Distort-> Wave and give any value you desire but give very less values so that it gives a good, aesthetic and realistic look and doesn’t looks more artificial. You must get some thing like this.

Step 6: Creating another electric beam

Now repeat steps 2 to 5 one more time to create another electric beam. This is how you will get the final output.