Clouds and Lightnings

Original:

Result:

Yesterday was a thunderstorm, and i was trying to make a picture of lightnings. I couldn't get it. Finally i thought that i can make it in Adobe Photoshop! And soon i was finishing my brush set of lightnings. We'll need a picture with regular sky and one with thunder clouds. You can use my photos of course. You'll find thunder clouds picture in the middle of this tutorial. Open our picture:

Take Magic Wand , and use the following settings:

And click somewhere in the middle of the sky:

Some areas are not selected, so click on them:

Our sky is selected:

Sometimes you select too much. To fix it, go to Magic Wand properties and press Subtract from selection and simply click on the problem area to substract it. Also you can try to change Tolerance

Now open a thunder cloud photo. It was taken yesterday :0) Thunder clouds picture should be bigger than your main photo.

Select-All or press Ctrl+A on your keyboard:

Now go to Edit-Copy.

Click on the main picture:

And click Edit-Paste Into:

Take Move tool , and move your clouds the way you want:

You can see some light areas on the trees (i indicated them with red dots. Looks like apples to me :8)):

Take Eye Dropper and click on the leaves ti pick it's color:

Now use Brush tool and choose small soft brush:

In the layer window click on the layer with the main picture. If you don't see this window, press F7:

and just draw on the problem areas:

This is what i got so far:

Now comes the most interesting part- adding lightnings! Go ahead and download my lightning brush set and install it.

Once you install brushes, set foreground color to white so lightnings will be white.

Choose any lightning you want:

and click and draw lightning:

Have a good lightning time! :0)