i'm a web designer

We will be making the smash desktop background featured on my art page. To get started open up Adobe Photoshop

Start with your document, I started with 1440×900 pixel size, but you can do any. Fill it with a dark grey. Mine was #0a0a0a.

Select a large brush with the hardness set way down to 0 and use a lighter grey, I used #2c2c2c, to place a highlight in the centre of the canvas.

Import your image. You can download mine here. It’s an image I found on my computer from a while ago, I don’t know where it came from and I don’t know the permissions of it. But I used it anyway.

Now comes the fun part. We have to cut the guy with his guitar out from the background. There are many ways of doing this, but I used the pen tool. For this image you could probably use this tutorial as it has a fairly simple background.

Copy the cut-out into your current background canvas and position in the top right. Or if you want you can go Edit->Transform->Flip Horizontal to get it in the top left.

Duplicate the guy layer, and give the first one a glow with these settings. The glow colour is #0072ff.

On the second guy layer you created, de-saturate it (turns it greyscale) by either pressing (on pc) ctrl+shift+u, (on mac) command+shift+u. Or going Image->Adjustments->Desturate.

Set the blending mode to overlay.

Almost finished now.

Either select some circle brushes you have, or create your own shapes. Create a new layer behind both of your guy layers, but above the background layer and start brushing around your guy with the colour of the brushes as #0072ff.

I would supply the brushes for you, but I forgot where I got them from and I’m not sure of the permissions from the original creator. Sorry. Hopefully you will be able to achieve something similar to mine. There are some other brushes used in there too.

A good resource for brushes is Qbrushes

With your circle brush selected again, create a new layer behind the blue one and add a few more circles with the colour #bf0249.

Last thing to do is select a grungy texture background, Google provided mine, but I lost the link. Useless aren’t I?

Import it into your background underneath every later except the background. For mine I changed the blend mode to multiply and set the opacity at 71%. These values are likely to be different for you, so play around with them.

I hope this tutorial was good, though it was my first one so I don’t expect it to be perfect. Any feedback you have will be gratefully appreciated, I’d also like to see what you come up with so comment or mail me a link.