Lens of Sunset

Start with a square canvas, I chose 600x600 for this. Create a new layers and fill it with a gradient fill, made of suitable sunset/sunrise colours... whatever suits your intended final artwork.

On a second new layer, draw your silhouette outline. Give it a very light touch of Filter >> Blur >> Gaussian Blur. Minimal settings are required, just enough to soften the edges.

On a third new layer, give it some Filter >> Render >> Clouds. Then turn off the visibility of all other layers. Switch to the Channels tab, select any layer and duplicate it, renaming it to mask as you do. Switch back to the Layers tab.

Go to the Select menu, and slide down to the Load selection option. Click. When the dialog box appears, under the Channel option, choose mask , then click ok.

You will now have a set of mostly transparent clouds, with built-in shading. Hitting Ctrl-T to bring up the Transform option, hold down Ctrl+Alt+Shift and click-drag one of the top corners. This should drag it out into an inverted trapezoid, much wider at the top and the bottom edge staying unaltered.

Instant parallax cloud layer.

Hit Enter to set those alterations. Then select only the section of clouds that are inside the frame. Do not try select all, as this will cause the next nifty bit to fail.

Don’t ask me why this works, because I can’t explain it… just that it does.

Once you have this area selected, to the TRANSFORM thing again, manually (No Ctrl-Shift-T allowed!) and you will notice that the shaded areas of the cloud stop matching up properly, giving the clouds instant depth.

Create yet another new layer, fill it with black. Do a Filter >> Render >> Lens Flare, the following settings:

Brightness: 90%
Lens Type: 50-300mm Zoom

Click-n-Drag the flare’s center to somewhere near your intended focal point. No need to be exact for this, aim for the best lens flare instead of a perfect location match.

Changing the Blending mode to screen, your lens flare now sits on a transparent background. Slide it around until you get the flare right where you want it.

Finished image! Add your finishing touches, colour alterations, additional image elements, etc.