Spacy Wallpaper with Apophysis and Photoshop

Now, let's start the tutorial:

1. Start Apophysis.

When you start the program, it automatically generates a random batch of "flames", each numbered and listed in the left column of the screen. If you click on a number, the flame loads into the main work area, where you can edit it if you wish.

For this tutorial, any further editing of the flames isn't necessary, but if you'd like to read more about the features, be sure to check out the excellent tutorials here.

Now, just click some of the numbers, and check what you get, until you find a flame you like. Note that there's a lot of luck involved in getting a good flame immediately, so be patient.

After some tries, I bumped onto this one:

If you're happy with the flame, click Flame>render flame to disk in the menu bar and use this settings:

Width = 1024
Quality = 100%
Choose a destination folder.

Then hit the "render" button. This rendering process can take some time, it depends on your processor speed.

This is what I got:

So far for the Apophysis-part, let's dive into Photoshop!

2. Open your render in Photoshop.

Duplicate the background layer (or the layer where you flame is on), by right-clicking on the layer in the layers palette and then choosing "duplicate layer".

Now set the blending mode of this layer copy to "soft light".

Repeat this and duplicate this layer copy some more times (notice that the blending mode of this copies is also set to "soft light").

I made 4 duplicates and this was the end result (click for larger version):

Pretty sweet for a random render and some easy Photoshopping, isn't it?