So I was flicking through rots looking for a suitable moment. I never really liked Mace having a purple saber glow so I settled on this scene...
"Whether or not he is the senate remains to be seen"
We need to remove the coloured glow which is a bit of extra work. I'll be using photoshop 7.
If we were creating a saber from scratch we would begin by outlining whatever prop blade was used during filming, and filing in that area white - on a fresh layer. I would then duplicate the white blade we've created and play with some Gaussian blur to ensure the blade has smooth edges.
Here i have taken the original image and duplcated it. So we have 2 copies of the same image, one above the other. I set the layer type of the top image as 'colour'. Then i used the smudge tool to drag the purple glow areas of the image toward the white core. Now if i set the top layer back to 'normal' it should look something like this...
Now i have used the magic wand tool to highlight the white saber core - this will be on the lowest image that we haven't edited. I have filled in the area with white on a new layer - above all others.
Here's what that looks like, You can see that using the smudge tool we have hidden the purple area sunder the saber core. and the are that was purple will take on the colours from the areas i used to smudge. Let's set that layer back to 'colour'.
You can see that there really isn't much of a glow coming off that thing now. Now I'll take the layer that we created with just a white blade section and give it a bit of a blur. You can see now that it seems to have a bit of a glow. The amount I blur things tends to vary on how close an oject is to the camera and therefore how large. These blades aren't too close so I wont have to blur things too much. It's best to just play around and see what looks best.
* The glow could be a little stronger so BEFORE i blur that layer with the white blade i'll duplicate it. then i will blur each copy a different amount. IF the glow appear too stong I can easily reduce the opacity a little. - this method is an on the fly adjustment, it would have been simpler create a white area larger than the original saber core. But let's move on for now.
* If i smudge the colours offf the other blades you can see they appear to have more of a glow than Mace did.
Now we can play with adding our own glow. Things tend to vary depending on the shot. I've chosen 2 shades of blue to create the glow for this saber.
I'm going to use the magic wand to highlight the saber core on the original image again. Now i'm going to want an area larger but in the same shape. I will go to 'select' on the menu bar, then down to 'modify' and then choose 'expand'. I will choose an amount, in this case about 3.
Creating a fresh layer above the others i will fill in the area with a light blue [0,150,255] - RGB value
After doing that i will set this layer to 'overlay'. Now it's starting to look like something.
Now we will do the same again. Highlight the original core. But this time expand by about twice the amount we did last time, so this time I'll choose 6 as the amount to expand. Thin I will fill a new layer with a darker blue [0,50,255] - RGB value. I'll set this layer to 'color' and drag it below the lighter blue layer.
Now i will add a gaussian blur to each of the blue layers, I'll blur each of them about 6.
and that's about it. Of course the more fine tuning you do the better results you will get.
I noticed a few other things while playing with this scene...
one thing about star wars is that the lightsabers have never ever looked consistent. a lot of the times it's not noticeable but here's a shot of the mace vs sidious duel - notice there still isn't much glow going on here.
And yet here we are only moments later....pretty brightly lit.
In this case the same method used earlier will wind up looking different here.
This shot really reminds me of 'spaceballs' - "You idiots. That's not the chancellor killing you...It's his digital stunt double."
btw..What the hell was this guy ^ waiting for?
did any of that make sense?
Anyway I'll try get a video together soon if i can.