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Sometimes it's fun to edit a photo so that it's got a lightsaber in it to make a spoof of Star Wars, or maybe some laser fire as a phaser if it's Star Trek; doing this in Photoshop is quick and easy.

Adding lightsaber effects is something I used to do in Paint Shop Pro before I started using Photoshop - and the principles for doing the effect is the same in both, just you find the tools in slightly different places. If you're adding the lightsaber blade to an existing image then make sure you've got it open. In this example I am using a picture of Yoda from The Empire Strikes Back.

Now in this picture, I'm going to replace his gimmer stick with a green lightsaber. The first thing to do here is to use the line tool and draw white line from his hand to at least the end of the stick. The width of this line will depend on the size of the picture, and in mine was 8 pixels. Now for the glow we're going use this line to help produce a glowing effect to the lightsaber to stop it seeming ridgid are unrealistic (not that a lightsaber is really real though you know). Duplicate the layer twice, and on the original use a Gaussian Blur (Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur) of 2 pixels - this step in creating the glow will stop the core from seeming solid, and will blend with the rest. Now on the next layer use the gaussian blur again but this time make it the width of the line, and then for the other layer make it twice width. You can keep on repeating this step a few more times to build up detail if you so wish.

By this stage the lightsaber looks a little pale, it's only white, and I said it'd be green - so here comes the bit where we colour it in. Before Photoshop will allow the blade to be selected, the blade layers will need to be merged into 1 (selecting the 3 or more layers, and pressing Ctrl+E will do this). Now with the layer selected, Ctrl+Click on the layer in the Layer Palette and then create a New Layer (Ctrl + Shift + N); making sure it is at the top. Pick your desired colour, mine is green, and then use the Paint tool twice on the new layer. Once you have done this you can change the layer blending mode to either Colour Dodge, Linear Dodge, or Screen.

This same effect can be used for phasers, etc. For the phaser effect I use a thinner line that spreads out, and a much wider range of gaussian blurred layers.

If you are using the lightsaber on a lightbackground, then during the step where you duplicate the blade layer, you will want to duplicate the first one after it is blurred so that there are two layers with 1 pixel blur. When merging the layers, this extra layer is left out and moved to the top (this will be above the coloured layer as well).