Having Fun Creating Lightsabers Out Of Thin Air - Photoshop Experiments

As part of my planning for my Cosplay photos for my upcoming Fan-Fiction story that I plan to start releasing (chapter by chapter) in a short while, I have been experimenting with various effects in Photoshop to prepare for some of the images that will accompany each chapter.

Tonight I was working on Lightsabers. I do have ForceFX Lightsabers, but I want to create a variety of hilts and I can't do that with the Force FX toy. Instead, I want to create my own hilts out of craft foam and other craft tools (which I will share here once I've advanced that some more) and create lightsabers out of thin air. Having lightsabers be created from thin air actually gives me a bit more freedom in terms of photo adjustments and I can ultimately fix it up how I want and still have it look pretty realistic.

So I found a tutorial online that explain how to do that. There were a couple of minor details I had to alter for my version of Photoshop, but I managed, I created lightsabers, and I had fun playing around with colours, creating new sabres each time, and using still photos I had from some videos I made recently.

Now, I realise it looks like these lightsabers are literally magically appearing out of my hands. First, I wanted to use images where I cold use my hands as a starting point. Second, the reason there is no hilt, is because I haven't completed it yet hehe. I have cut a first sample of craft foam, I will need to cut some more to correct errors. Then comes the shaping, painting, curing, varnishing, etc.

The first blade I made, I tried the way in the tutorial, without the slight adjustment, where I had to add a second layer for the tip of the hilt, which looks a bit off according to me. The other blades are made with that slight adjustment. It was a lot easier, but the tip is rounder. I still need to figure out how to play around with it a bit, IF I can.

Let me know what you guys think, the feedback is more than welcome.

By the way, a few weeks ago, I was having fun attempting to place my subject (being me) into a different background. I've actually played around with that one a bit more and added more shadow so that I would blend with the background a bit better.

I've also picked out my costume for my character, which is ultimately a mix of various clothing pieces I own and props, put together in such a way for it to fit the style of the Old Republic Era of the Star Wars galaxy.

The next step will be Lightning. And I have an old version of Photoshop, so...so far I haven't been very successful but I found some images for Photoshop that might work, if I can open them in my version of Photoshop, that is haha I'll keep you all posted.