But, if we think a little outside the box, we can use it for more than just lightning. Then just give the brush a name and there you have a lightning brush.Īt this point, we have achieved what we first set out to do, which was to create a lightning brush. Now, go under the Edit menu and choose Define Brush Preset. So, press Command-I (PC: Ctrl-I) to Invert the image, so the sky is white and the lightning is black. When defining a brush, Photoshop will disregard the white area, only defining the black areas and any little hints of gray there might be. Then, if necessary, move the sliders to tighten up the contrast a bit more (I ended up dragging the center gray Input Levels midtones slider to the right a little to 0.75), and click OK. This will force everything that is that shade of gray or darker to go black. Grab the black (shadows) eyedropper below the Options button, and click on the light gray area next to the lightning bolt. With the Red copy channel active, press Command-L (PC: Ctrl-L) to open the Levels dialog. So, make a duplicate of the Red channel by dragging it down onto the Create New Channel icon. In this case, it looks like it will be the Red channel. Toggle through the individual channels and locate the channel that defines the lightning pretty well, while the background is as dark as possible.

Open the Channels panel by going to Window>Channels. To create the brush, we are going to start with the image’s channels. You just never know what you might be able to use them for.

It’s always good to have a folder of images that contain generic elements like this. Here, we’ll start with this simple stock image of a lightning strike. When you look at the lightning image below, what does the shape of the lightning resemble? Read on to find out. However, in my pursuit of this, I had a “Eureka!” moment. Here’s something that I actually stumbled upon by accident: I was attempting to take a photo of lightning and create a brush from it, so I could have lightning when I needed it.

Photoshop lightning brush