Creating a Light Explosion

We start with a blank Black canvas and then add some White text:

Next, we open up the Layer Styles for the text layer and choose a Drop Shadow, Inner Shadow, and Color Overlay. Note that these values should be customized to suit your needs - experiment and play around with the outcomes. Here are the settings we used for this example:

After applying these Layer Styles, we want to duplicate our text layer, so right-click it and Duplicate. Then hide the duplicate and select the one underneath. Goto Layer > Merge Visible. Then Goto Filter > Distort > Polar Coordinates, and choose Polar to Rectangular. We should have something like this:

Next, goto Image > Rotate Canvas > 90° CW. Then goto Filter > Stylize > Wind, From the Right. Then press Ctrl+F to repeat it a couple times. Then go back to Filter > Stylize > Wind, and choose From the Left. Repeat it with Ctrl+F once. We should have this:

Next, rotate it back (Image > Rotate Canvas > 90° CCW), then goto Filter > Distort > Polar Coordinates, and choose Rectangular to Polar.

Then goto Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Color Balance and play about with your colors to get the right scheme. We ended up with this:

Now if we show our text layer again, we should end up with something like this:

Play around with the Color Balance and Layer Styles and see what you can come up with.