How to Make a Power Blast
- The blast has to come from somewhere. I put a circle here for tutorial purposes but you just pretend it's a gun muzzle or someones hand
- Use the polygon lasso tool and click out a blast beam selection in perspective like you see here. Make sure it's on it's own layer. Fill with a good bolt color. (light blue, purple, green, and red are good). Make sure it's a bright color on the high saturation
- Now, create a new blank layer above the outer bolt. ctrl+click on the outerbolt layer to make the bolt a selection. Contrast this selection by a few pixels and fill this new contracted selection with white on it's own layer. You should now have something like you see here
- Apply a gaussian blur to each layer. Play with the settings. (I used a 2,5 pixel blur). You may need less or more depending on the size of your picture. This technique also makes a good light saber
- On another new blank layer, grab your paintbrush, set it to 1 pixel, 100% opacity, normal blendingmode, and brush out some lightning forks along the beam
- If you have photoshop 5 or higher, you can apply the "outer glow" layer effect to the lightning layer. Use the eyedropper to select the outer glow color from the beam itself and then you're done
