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As always with my tutorials, create an image that's 400x400. Make sure your canvas is white, and press 'D' until your Foreground colour is black and your background colour is white. This sets up our image nicely. First of all, we want to get a nice looking effect for our base image.
To do this, first of all make a new layer. Then go to 'Filters - Render - Clouds' and you'll get some cool looking clouds. When you've done this, go to 'Filters - Render - Difference Clouds' to make the clouds more pronounced. Press 'CTRL+F' about ten times to apply this filter several times until your clouds look something like this:
That's not all to begin with, however. Next we want to finish how out base layer will look like. Press 'CTRL+U' to bring up the Hue/Saturation window. In here we want to colorize our image, so tick the colorize box in the bottom right hand corner. Enter 220 into the Hue, 65 into the Saturation and keep Brightness at zero. Now you should have blue clouds like so:
Here comes the effects we're going to apply to this image. Press 'CTRL+A' to select this layer, then press 'CTRL+V' to paste that layer as a new layer. We want to apply a metallic style surface to this layer as this is the second most visible layer on the final image. Go to 'Filters - Artistic - Plastic Wrap'.
Your Highlight Strength should be 15, and your Detail and Smoothness should be 5. Press OK, and you may notice it looks... grey. We don't want that in a vibrant blue image, so press 'CTRL+U' and apply the same settings as before (220 Hue, 65 Saturation and 0 Brightness). This will then give you something along these lines:
Starting to take shape, isn't it? Indeed it is. Next, we want to achieve the blue vibrance in the finished picture at the bottom of this page. This is quite simple... all you need to do is to create a new layer. Go to 'Filter - Render - Clouds' and then 'Filter - Render - Difference Clouds' several times. Colorize it blue with all previous settings (220 Hue, 65 Saturation and 0 Brightness) and you're laughing... maybe not.
Because we're not back where we started. That's easily solved. Right click on the layer you just made and click on 'Blending Options'. Avoid pressing anything on the menu to the right for the time being. It's quite simple. Change the Opacity to 80-90%, (I chose 85%) and change the Blending Mode to 'Linear Dodge' in the drop down box. Click ok, and you should now have something very impressive indeed, looking along these lines:
The final touch to add to this image is to add a cloudy vibrant blur over the whole thing. There's a good, effective way of doing this. Create a new layer, and go to 'Filter - Render - Clouds'. This will give you that same, familiar cloud effect. Then go to 'Filter - Pixelate - Mezzotint'. Select long lines from the Drop Down list and you should have a slashed effect like this one below:
When you've got that, go to 'Filter - Blur - Radial Blur' and choose 100%, Zoom, Best. This will give you a warped ring effect. Colorize this using the same settings as before to keep consistent. (220 Hue, 65 Saturation and 0 Brightness). When you've done this, it's time to add our final blending effect to give it that even better, more vibrant feel. Right click the layer and click 'Blending Options'.
Change the Layer's opacity to 80% and change the Blend mode to Soft Light. If you want, blue it slightly to finish that soft look, or even make it sharper. It's your choice. Here's my final image I got. I did it twice in a row using this tutorial, so here are both the results I got up with when changing a few of the numbers:
Last Updated Saturday, October 11th, 2008
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