Intense Solar Flare (Filter) Effect

Well, I think it’s time to travel back a few years in tutorial history and relive those cool filter effect tutorials! I used to love making these things 4 or so years ago when I was just learning Photoshop, good times!

1. Create a Background

First, start by creating a new document, I’ve used a document size of 400 x 400 pixels here, but you might want to use something much larger so you can easily resize it to any size later on. Now change your foreground and background colors to something other than black and white, I used #b38adb and #212121 (a nice purple and dark grey)

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

2. Lense Flare Filters

Let’s start making the background a bit more interesting. Go to Filter > Render > Lense Flare, using all of the default settings if you want, just move the flare around a little bit. Apply Lense Flare again on the background layer but in a different position.

Next, apply Filter > Distort > Twirl, and use an angle of about 250, feel free to try out other settings though!

3. Duplicates, Rotating, Layer Modes

Duplicate your main (Background) layer then rotate it 90 degrees clockwise (Edit > Transform > Rotate 90° CW).

In the layers palette, change your duplicated layer mode to Hard Light, or some other good options are Overlay, Soft Light and Vivid Light.

Duplicate your original duplicate layer and rotate it another 90° CW, this gives the background a really cool effect.

Looks pretty nice so far, but I think we can make it look a lot nicer!

4. Finishing Touches, etc.

Alright, start off by flattening your image (so that it’s all on one layer), do this by going to Layer > Flatten Image. Now duplicate your one remaining layer, then apply Filter > Blur > Gaussion Blur with a radius of about 2.0-5.0, lastly, change the layer mode for your duplicate layer to Overlay. This gives your whole image a nice, soft effect.

Again, duplicate your Background layer and move it above your first duplicate in the layers palette, then apply the filter, Distort > Displace, using the PSD download I have below.

After pressing OK in the above screen, you’ll be taken to an open file box, where you have to choose a PSD file. You can use whatever PSD file you want, but it’s best you just use a PSD file that contains black and white grunge.

You can download the PSD file that I used from here.

After using the Displace filter you should be left with something that looks like this:

Pretty neat, huh? To blend this layer with the bottom layers, change the layer mode to Soft Light, and also lower the opacity to around 50-80%.

I think it looks just a little bit too intense now, so if you think so too, follow these few steps:

1. Duplicate your Displaced layer.
2. Change the Layer Mode for your duplicate to Normal.
3. Lower the Opacity to about 20-50%.

Mess around with some other filters, layer modes and opacities if you want to, but I’m done for this tutorial now! I hope you enjoyed this tutorial, it was just a random filter effect tutorial

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25 responses

sfufoet said:November 4th, 2006

where is the pictures?

Eli said:November 4th, 2006

Sorry about that stufoet, I’ve fixed the problem

sfufoet said:November 4th, 2006

Joseph said:November 4th, 2006

Let’s do the time warp again, love this one

Zach said:November 7th, 2006

looks a little over saturationed imo

Ahmed said:November 20th, 2006

dear sir
your website is perfect and wonderful but i wish you add more tutorials as photoshop like illustrator, maya, flash ….etc

Newcommer said:November 23rd, 2006

Thank you for the tutorial:)

Sean said:December 20th, 2006

its a nice tutorial but doesnt look anything like a solar flare

siham said:May 24th, 2007

lovely background
thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaank you

aksel said:June 22nd, 2007

This was very usefull. i didnt know the displace effect was so cool:) thank you!

rednose said:July 19th, 2007

can be usefull thx

TK said:August 4th, 2007

^_^ COOOOOL ^_^

sreenish said:September 1st, 2007

fentastic!!!!!

victoria said:December 26th, 2007

fantastic!brilliant-you’re a genuis, buddy

Michael Keeling said:December 27th, 2007

Photo shop is the greatest thing I have found. Period

Chris said:January 26th, 2008

Great tut, really simple and looks awesome.

Silent Noise said:March 21st, 2008

I”ve been looking hard for tutorials for everything …
(Maya – Photoshop – AutoCAD – manga Studio – Poser 7)
i hope ‘that one day to be a Graphic Designer FREAK!
Thank u…

Harry said:April 18th, 2008

Nice effect

Newsgirl said:June 5th, 2008

Wow. So cool! I just did i tin PhotoShop CS3

ps_freak said:January 11th, 2010

thanks
this one is awesome

ashwani said:January 30th, 2010

IT IS VERY TRICKY JOB TO DO IT….