Create a Realistic Lightning Effect With Photoshop

Photoshop is a very powerful photo editing program, even without any extra plugins, it can create many realistic effects, one of them is this cool lightning effect. Note that this technique is actually used by photoshop professionals but it is actually very simple to follow.

1. First, let's grab an image to be used as the background, and in this tutorial, I took the picture of a city at night from Windows Vista built-in wallpapers.
   
   
2. Now we will create the lighting by firstly create a New Layer, then use Rectangular Marquee Tool to create rectangle marquee about this size.
   
   
3. Create a linear gradient with Gradient Tool inside the rectangle marquee.
   
   
4. Go to Filter > Render > Difference Clouds. Then go to Image > Adjustment > Invert. The image now should become like this:
   
   
5. To make the lightning look more realistic, we need to adjust its levels. Do this by opening Image > Adjustment > Levels... then move the middle slider to the right to make the lightning slimmer.
   
   
6. Let's position the image by rotating it and moving it to the desired position. You may also want to resize the image by using Free Transform tool.
   
   
7. We need to blend the colours of the new layer with the colours of the background. We do this by setting the layer blending mode to Screen. See the image below to find out how.
   
   
8. Now we just need to erase the lightning edges, use Eraser tool to clean the edges. Make sure that you choose Brush mode, large feathered brush size, and the opacity should be around 70%.
   
   
9. Congratulations! You have just finished create a lightning effect, you may want to add more lightning by repeating step 1 to 8. The finished image should look like this: