Create a new document - mine is 600x800 - select a large hard round brush and colour one half of the page black so that the division is the shape of your lightning bolt.



Run filters/blur/gaussian blur choosing 100px for both x and y.



Open filters/render/clouds/difference clouds, choose the following values then click OK.





Select colours/invert colours



Select colours/levels and push the left hand input slider to the right until you are happy with the lightning.



Colour/colourize - I chose these values





Good for electrical sparks too! (Maybe your control panel is short-circuiting Drac.)

I had a script for this but 2.8 broke it somehow. It doesn't run and locks up scriptfu.exe and such. This will work great until I get it fixed, so thanks

No problem - have fun!

You're right, that was pretty easy. Thanks for the idea. There may be a couple of loose wires on my control panel but they're mostly just in my head.

In fact I think this is the same technique he uses in his script

Easy/breezy tut with pretty good results. Thanks for sharing it Erisian.

Glad you like it Lyle.

Thanks Erisian,
nice and easy, I resized it so wouldn't take as much room.

Beautiful Molly. I might try an animated version.