Intense Solar Flare

1. First create a new document, I'll be using a size of 400 x 400 pixels.

Now change your foreground and background colors to something other than Black/White. I used #b38adb and #212121.

Go into the filters and apply Filter > Render > Clouds on the Background layer.

2. Now again with the filters. Go to Filter > Render > Lense Flare, you can use all the default settings except move the flare around a little bit.

Now apply Lense Flare again except in a different position.

Now apply Filter > Distort > Twirl, use an angle of about 250.

3. Duplicate the main layer then distort it 90° CW, Edit > Transform > Rotate 90° CW.

Now in the layers palette change the layer mode for the duplicated layer to Hard Light.

Duplicate the duplicated layer and rotate it another 90° CW.

Looking alright so far but let's make it look much nicer.

4. Flatten the image (Layer > Flatten Image)

Then duplicate the Background layer. Apply Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur with a radius of about 5.0.

Change the layer mode for this blurred layer to Overlay.

Duplicate the Background layer again and move it to the top of the layers palette. Apply Filter > Distort > Displace with these settings and a grungy PSD file.

You can download my grungy PSD file from here.

You should be left with a cool result like this:

Now change the layer mode for this layer to Soft Light and lower the opacity to about 80%.

I think it looked fairly cool without the layer mode change, so let's duplicate this layer then change the layer mode to Normal and lower the opacity to about 25%.

Mess around with some other stuff and you can always come up with some nice and unique results. I hope you enjoyed the tutorial.