Chaos Glow

This tutorial will show how I made this Wallpaper

In this tutorial, I used these Fractal brushes made by Adastreia and PhotoShop CS - ffractal.zip

1. First, let's make a new image. I'm using 400 x 400 for this tutorial. Fill the layer with black using your Paint Bucket.

2. Now go to your Layers Palette and click on the New Layer icon.

3. Switch your background/foreground colours so that white is now the foreground colour. You are going to be alternating between black and white brush layers for the next few steps.

4. Select your Brush Tool and then select one of the fractal brushes we just loaded into our Brush Library.

5. With white as your foreground colour, start your brushing.

6. Keep alternating black and white brushed layers, remember you don't have to keep using the same brush, I've used 5 different brushes on 5 new layers in this sample.

7. Now we're going to start adding some colour to liven up our image. Select the Colour Balance option from the Layer Options tool in your Layer Palette:

8. Play with the slider settings (black arrow) until your image changes to a colour you like. You're going to be making a few of these Colour Balance layers, so remember also to adjust the Tone Balance (red arrow) differentiating which areas will be coloured.

9. I have 4 Colour Balance layers in this image.

10. Now I realize it doesn't look very attractive at the moment, but we're going to change that. To tone down the brightness a bit, I'm going to lower the opacity of the first Colour Balance layer to 28% (you can adjust the opacity on any layer until you get the look you want)

12. You can also add a Levels Layer over top of the Colour Balance layers by again selecting your Layer Option tool and clicking Levels, then move the sliders to get a look you like.

13. Now we're going to add a Gradient layer (or two). First, click on your top Brushing Layer (the one just below the first Colour Balance Layer) and then click on the New Layer tool in your Layers Palette.

14. Now choose two new colours in your Colour Palette in the Tool Menu and select the Gradient Tool.

15. Draw a Gradient Path across your new layer. It will appear to cover your other work but don't worry, that's easily fixed by changing the Blending Mode for your Gradient Layer to Color. You can add more than one Gradient Layer if you want, it just depends on how you want your completed image to look.

18. With your Gradient Layer still selected, go to Filter>>Render>>Clouds and click once to add a blended effect to your Gradient.

17. That's it, you're done.