For a good while now people have been asking each other "How the hell do you do that Lightsaber effect?", and many have tried with only a few succeeding. But here is a way that is so simple to do, you will end up kicking yourself think "Why didn't I think of that?"

I'm going to start off by doing a single image. A filmstrip is a longer process, but the principals are the same. You will need Adobe Photoshop 5.0 to do this, but I have tried it in Paint Shop Pro and it seems to work okay. I have even provided a picture for you to practice with - It was from Star Wars: Episode I - Insider's Guide

1.) Open the image you are going to Rotoscope, and create a new layer - Call it "Blades".

2.) If you have more that one blade in the shot, you can draw ALL of them on this layer, it doesn't matter, but select your POLYGONAL LASSO TOOL, and draw over your sticks (or whatever you used for blades during filming). You can also smooth the tips as well, by going SELECT -> MODIFY -> SMOOTH, and set it to 3 pixels.

3.) Fill the selection with WHITE using the PAINT BUCKET.

4.) To take off a little bit of the sharpness, what we are going to do is add a GAUSSIAN BLUR; go FILTER -> BLUR -> GAUSSIAN BLUR. Set it to 1 pixel, and press okay.

5.) The blades are now completed, so now we go on to phase two - The glow.
Create a new layer, and change its Blending properties to SCREEN.
If there are more than one blade on the screen that are a different colour, then you will have to create seperate layers for each of them, but if they are the same, then you can use the same layer.

6.) Select your POLYGONAL LASSO TOOL again, and select around the blade, but making it a few pixels bigger - this is basically providing the boundries to the glow.

7.) Choose the color you wish to have as your glow. I have always loved the blue color, so I use these properties R:0 G:128 B:255. Fill the selected area with this color, and DESELECT it.

8.) Add another GAUSSIAN BLUR, but instead of only having the parameters set to 1 pixel, change it to 5 pixels. This will provide a good blur, and it will look pretty sweet!

That's it! If you are doing a series of images, as if you were doing a Filmstrip, then do all your blades on one layer, and then GLOW COLOR A on another layer, and GLOW COLOR B, on another, and so on until it is completed.

Any comments, questions, job offers, love letters, and hate mail should be sent to the following E-Mail address.

dirkdiggler@onetel.net.uk

Good luck in your projects.

Yours truly,
Mark Hedge.