Stripy abstract wallpaper in Photoshop

Note: This tutorial is written for Photoshop CS on a Windows XP platform and assumes you have a basic knowledge of Photoshop. However, this technique will work on most versions of Photoshop or similar graphics package.

This tutorial will show you how to create a stripy abstract wallpaper from scratch in just a few steps. It will look like this:

The wallpaper in this tutorial will be 800 x 600 but it will work in any size. Simply change the canvas size in step 1.

1. Create a new canvas 800 pixels in height and 600 pixels in width.

2. Now you set the 2 base colours for the wallpaper. The example uses #1B5484 and #FFFFFF – any two differing colours will work however. Set your foreground colour to #1B5484 and your background colour to #FFFFFF. Choose Filter > Render > Clouds. Your canvas will look like this:

3. Next choose Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast… and set the Contrast to +50. It will create this:

4. Now choose Filter > Distort > Ocean Ripple; set the Ripple Size to 11 and the Ripple Magnitude to 15. It will look like this:

5. Now to create the stripy effect – choose Filter > Blur > Motion Blur. Set the angle to 90° and the distance to 225.

6. Finally, choose Filter > Sharpen > Sharpen. Hold down Ctrl and press F to repeat the filter. This brings some subtle clarity to the wallpaper.

This entry was posted by Tim on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 4:02 pm and is filed under Photoshop, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.