Truth be told, I enjoy playing with images like that. I use The GIMP graphics program and there's so many user-made plugins that I actually have two different ones for lightsaber blades. It takes a little tinkering to find the settings that look best (a lot depends on the lighting in the original image) and you have to draw the blade outline (which is child's play if there's a blade/stick to draw around) but it's mostly intuitive.