Hurricane Effect

As always with my tutorials, create an image that's 400x400. Make sure your canvas is white, and press 'D' until your Foreground colour is black and your background colour is white. First thing to do is to go to 'Filters - Render - Clouds' to make some clouds on our image. Next, go to 'Filters - Render - Difference Clouds' and press 'CTRL+F' to repeat this effect several times until your image looks more white than it does black. Here's how mine's looking right now:

It's not looking like much of a hurricane at the moment... well, next step is to add a 'Watery Effect' to the picture. This will be done in a lot more detail in another tutorial, but for now, go to 'Filter - Artistic - Plastic Wrap'. For the best effects, use 15 Highlight Strength and 5 for Detail and Smoothness. This will make your image look a lot better, like so:

Now for the effects. Go to 'Filter - Distort - Twirl'. Use an angle of 50 for best results, and click ok. Press 'CTRL+F' to repeat this several times. I did it six times and it makes your clouds look a bit more twisted and more... cyclone like! (which is the proper name for a hurricane) Now you should have something looking like this:

Now we want to add some colour to our cyclone of clouds... however, when adding colour, remain subtle. If you use too much colour, it begins to look quite unrealistic and can even ruin the look of your hurricane all together. I pressed 'CTRL+U' to open the Hue/Saturation window, then I ticked 'Colorize' and then I put 220 as the Hue, 15 as the Saturation and 0 as the Brightness.

This way I got a very muted blue but was just blue enough to be convincing. That's not all though. In order to get the best look for your image, you may want to Auto Level it. Press 'CTRL+SHIFT+L' to do this. If it doesn't look better in your opinion, press 'CTRL+ALT+Z' to undo it. You should now have something along these lines:

It looks final and complete when it looks real. To make it look real on top of the effect we've applied, create a new layer and press 'D' to reset your colours. Go to 'Filters - Render - Clouds' and press 'CTRL+U' to open the Hue/Saturation window. Use the same settings as before (220 Hue, 15 Saturation and 0 Brightness) and press OK. Almost there... now we want to blend these clouds in with the hurricane to make it look more realistic. Right click the layer and go to Blending Options. Select 'Screen' from the drop down list and click ok.

The final touch is to make the clouds more predominant. Do this by selecting the layer with the hurricane twist on, then go to 'Filters - Sharpen - Sharpen' to sharpen the clouds. Also, you might find it better raising the contrast of the picture to make an even better final result. I tried it with +20 contrast and it turned out awesome! Here's my final results: