Blending Mode Magic

Start with a new document. You can use these settings if you'd like for this advanced blending mode magic Photoshop design tutorial.

Open another document with some goldish brown in it. It doesn't really matter what it is. Drag it into the new document with the moVe tool and Ctrl/Cmd 'T' holding Shift key to scale it down to a smaller size.

You don't have to duplicate it..just go to Filter: Blur: Motion Blur. You can use these settings but get a feel for what you think works for your situation.

Now you can duplicate the layer by dragging it to the new layer icon. Now bring up the Levels command under Image: Adjustments (also Ctrl L). Shift the white slider to the left to lighten the image data.

Press OK, duplicate the layer again (we're going to have lots of options to fool around with here because you want to be able to judge what's going to work the best for you).
Bring up the levels command again and make these adjustments. Note that immediately the histogram looks clipped; this is because there is less pixel data in the input levels (b/c it's being washed out from before).

Go to layer: merge linked after you have linked these two layers in the layers palette.
Ctrl T and rotate.  Hey, you can get free downloads from my new website PSDownloads right here.
 

 

Rotate by bringing the cursor outside of the bounding box to when you see the rotate bars.

Now you can start having fun with some blending modes.

Here I'm just adding a custom hue adjustment layer. To do this I must first Ctrl/Cmd Click on the layer icon to select it with the marching ants, then I can choose a hue adjustment layer. This will apply the hue directly to the layer you have selected.

You can do this (in this case with colorize) if you want to change the color or hue/saturation of a certain layer. Bringing up saturation intensifies the effect.

You can also a Levels adjustment layer.

If you'd rather learn in real-time video check this out.  The blending mode tutorial continues....