Inspired by “Catch the Beat” by Staredown Studios and this MSNBC Style Effect tutorial, I decided to have a go at making my own.
Digital Aurora
Digital Aurora flipped
Digital Aurora dual-screen
And I thought this one turned out kind of interestingly – applied the Polar Coordinates filter.
2560×1024
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Method
I used a slightly different method to the tutorial linked to above. I’ll go through the steps roughly here – if there’s any interest, I could make a video tutorial if this isn’t clear enough. Just let me know.
Basically, start off with a noise gradient (go in to the Gradient Editor and change Gradient Type to “Noise”). The colours don’t matter at this point, because you’ll make it grayscale in a moment.
Once you get a nice noise gradient (keep pressing Randomize until you get a good one), draw it on the canvas, then CTRL+SHIFT+U to take all the colour out of it.
Next, add a layer mask to the gradient layer, and draw in the basic shape you want. I went with a kind of semi-circle shape.
Apply the layer mask (right click on the layer and click “apply layer mask”), then put some motion blur on there to stretch the lines up.
After that, duplicate the layer and apply Filter > Pixelate > Mosaic to get some thicker lines, then run the Motion blur filter a couple of times to get rid of the squares. I wanted these to be more subtle so I turned the layer opacity down.
To get some colour in to the lines, I used a couple of Gradient Fill layers, set to Soft Light blend mode.
By now, it should be roughtly similar to what I was able to get. You might need to play around with the contrast/levels of the original layers to bring out the colours properly. If the colours look rought, flatten everything and then apply Motion Blur a couple of times to smooth things out.