Tutorial: Create a spectacular SF looking wallpaper

In this tutorial we are going to create the mosaic background and a cool radioactive looking text, combine this two elements and you will get an amazing desktop wallpaper.

Creating the background

1. Create a new document and fill the background layer with black.  Press the D key on your keyboard  to ensure that the default foreground (black) and background (white)  colors are being used.

2. Press Alt + F9 this will bring up the Actions Palette, at the buttom of the palette it should be a Create new action button, click it. Name the action as you want and press Record.

3. You are now recording the actions you make in Photoshop, duplicate the current layer and change the blending mode of the new layer to Screen.

4. Create a Clouds filter (Filter-> Render-> Clouds).

5. Add a Mosaic filter (Filter-> Pixelate-> Mosaic) set the cell size to: 50 squares.

6. Apply a Reticulation filter (Filter-> Sketch-> Reticulation) with the following properties:

7. At this point you have to stop the recording from the Actions Palette.

8. Now all you have to do to is select your created action and press play somewhere about 8-10 times … until the screen is fully covered with squares.

9. Merge all the layeres except the background layer.

10. Add a Photocopy filter (Filter-> Sketch-> Photocopy) with the following values:

Detail: 24
Darkness: 1

11. Press Ctrl + I this will invert the colors. Go Image -> Adjustments -> Auto levels … this is going to make things a little different

12. Now we have to add some color to our background you can do this by playing with Hue/Saturation Tool (Ctrl + U), you have to check Colorize first at the buttom of that menu to make things work.  My settings are aprox like this:

Colorize: Checked
Hue: -95
Saturation: -30
Lightness: 0

13. Duplicate the current layer (Ctrl + J) and change the blending mode of the newly created layer to Screen

14. Apply a Gaussian Blur (Fitler-> Blur-> Gaussian Blur) with a radius of 8-10 pixels. Be sure to play with it a little bit until you achieve a desired result

15. Use the Hue/Saturation tool (Ctrl+U) to increase the lightness by 50. And the last thing is to merge the two layers into a single one. YOU JUST FINISHED YOUR BACKGROUND

… IT’S TIME FOR THE TEXT RADIOACTIVE EFFECT

1. Write your text. Use this color: #9ffd60

2. Change the blending mode for the text layer to: Overlay

3. Apply the following Blending Options: Drop Shadow, Inner Shadow, Outer Glow.

4. The text looks very flat at this point … to add the finishing touch just Create a new layer just under the text layer … set the blending mode of this layer to Screen. Take a large simple round brush, with hardness of 0% with the color used for the text and start applying in the zone with the text.

Tags: text, Tutorials, wallpaper