Vortex in Photoshop

About time for another tutorial! This tutorial will teach you how to make a nice vortex type image in Photoshop. For this tutorial you may want a stylus unless you are good at drawing almost full circles with the mouse.

Alright to begin, Start with a canvas size 550px by 550px and black Background.

This part is pretty easy, Just take the brush tool, grab the “leaf” brush and draw a few leaves in the center like below.

Now goto Filter > Blur > Radial Blur and use the settings below:

Next goto Filter > Blur Radial Blur again except use the settings below:

Of course this depends on how many leaves you added, you can always go back and add more if needed, also Mess around with the blurs to get best results. These are my results so far:

Alright now for the fun stuff!

Take your brush tool, Create a new layer, select the leaf brush again(or try others see if it changes the look). I choose the leaf tool because it has a different points to give rather than circles. Goto the brush settings, Scatter and use the settings below:

Now draw some swirls around the center like below. This is the part you may want the stylus to get smooth curves unless you are good with the mouse, or you could just use the pen tool

When you are done drawing the swirls, Goto the layer settings and set an outer glow, change the color to white, everything else can remain default. Next draw some lines around the center and try to diversify the sizes of the lines and the distance between them, like below.

Now merge the layers for the lines and on the layer goto Filter > Blur > Radial Blur and use the settings below:

Then goto Filter > Blur > Radial Blur again and use these settings:

Again depends on the lines and how much blur you think looks best.

Now repeat the last 3 steps except instead of drawing lines use the brush scatter tool, same scatter settings, and brush less lines toward the center then what you did with the lines, add an outer glow, and use the same blur settings, you should get something similar to below:

Now all you need to do is Layer > New Layer, grab the Rainbow Gradient make it gradient on the layer you just created, and set it to Overlay and Opacity 35%. Looks cool?

Now you can just grab a star map or make your own splatters etc in the background and make it look like it’s in space or similar. Here are my results:(Click for full view).

**Extra, Try adding a Surface blur to the layer with the streaks that you just created, may make it look a bit more realistic

Photoshop