Television Effect for "The Wire" in Doctor Who

This tutorial will show you how to re-create a strange effect used in Dr. Who for their alien "the wire" in the 2006 episode "The Idiot's Lantern". This tutorial is only gauranteed to work on photoshop CS & Better. So let us begin.

First create a document and find a picture of a person, preferably on a plain background the same as I have done here.

The first step is to add some noise. So, duplicate the layer with the person in it, go to Filter > Noise > Add Noise and set the amount to 21.27 Now, the next step is to blur this, go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and set the blur amount to 1.2. Then set the layer style to Overlay. and duplicate that layer.

Then, merge all three layers.

You should now have this.

The Next step is to change the colour balance, so lets do that now... click on the small icon at the bottom of the layer pallet that is a half white, half black circle and from the pop-up menu go to Color Balance then, input these settings into the dialogue box for each colour.

Red = -61
Green = 0
Blue = +19

Now, merge the colour balance layer with our main layer and then duplicate the image again, then go to Filter > Noise > Add Noise and set the amount to 21.27 again. (It should have saved the last setting automatically, so you only need to press ok again). Now, go to Filter > Blur > Radial Blur and set it to

Amount: 100
Type: Zoom
Quality: Best

Click ok and then press Ctrl/Cmd + F to re-run the filter once more. you should now have something that looks like this.

Now, for the next step, move the layer beneath our radial blur layer above it and set the blend mode to Multiply.

You should have this

Now for the next step, you'll need some horizontal scanlines. Since this is an intermediate tutorial i will assume you know how to make patterns, if not, there's a tutorial in the "Basics" section on how to do so. You'll need a white scanline, or, if you already have black, use this and simply invert the colours.

Use the pattern stamp tool to run the scanlines over the picture and then set this to overlay and reduce the opacity to 24% and that's it, you're done.

Hope you enjoyed this.

Of course with some work, this simple effect can look quite good, here's what I did.