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Cant Sleep wallpaper

Tips about how I made the Cant Sleep wallpaper ( see wallpaper ).

Cant Sleep: Making of - Step 1
Start with new image, and fill it with very dark blue color. Then, with very large (800-1000 px) Soft Round Brush, add a bit of black here and there. Then, apply blur (filters > blur > gaussian > 30-40 px) to smooth the background.
Cant Sleep: Making of - Step 2
The following steps will help us to create insteresting non-homogeneous texture. Create New Layer, switch to Rough Round Bristle brush, set color to white, and fill entire layer with the chaotic brush strokes.

Cant Sleep: Making of - Step 3

Then, set this layer blend mode to Overlay. It will look almost invisible, but after all this is only a background 🙂
Cant Sleep: Making of - Step 4
In another new layer, repeat the same but with black brush.

Cant Sleep: Making of - Step 5
 

Then merge all layers (Ctrl-Shift-C), and adjust the brightness-contrast (images – adjustments) to make it just a bit brighter. I also added black Inner Glow to this layer effects.

Cant Sleep: Making of - Step 6
Now that we have the background, we need the objects. I have some photos of old buildings from my recent travel to Koeln (Cologne), Germany. One of them is on the right; there were 5 photos total, and how I merged them is the subject for another tutorial 🙂

Cant Sleep: Making of - Step 7
…and here is the resulting image. I joined several photos together, corrected perspective distortions and convertted to greyscale (Ctrl-Shift-U).

Cant Sleep: Making of - Step 8
Here is how the houses look on our background. Not quite right, but…

Cant Sleep: Making of - Step 9
…is it very easy to fix – just change this layer blending mode to Overlay!. To make it look a bit brighter, I duplicated this layer.
Cant Sleep: Making of - Step 10
 

I thought that the wallpaper needed something else, small but eye-catching, and decided that one of the windows should have light inside. This was very easy to do. First, zoom to the dizired window. As you can see, there is nobody inside yet 😉

Cant Sleep: Making of - Step 11
Create a new layer, and carefully fill entire window with light yellow color. Of course it looks bad now, but…
Cant Sleep: Making of - Step 12
…all you need to do to make it look better is to change the layer blending mode to Overlay!
Cant Sleep: Making of - Step 13
the light is too dark now, of course, so duplicate this layer until it is good enough (I duplicated it 5 times).

Cant Sleep: Making of - Step 14
The final touch would be the moon. I found the photo of the moon in Internet, pasted it and resized.

Cant Sleep: Making of - Step 15
 

Then I, again, changed its blending mode to Overlay, and also added light-blue Outer glow (about 20-30 pixels).

Cant Sleep: Making of - Step 16
Then I, again, duplicated the layer with moon, to make it darker and the glow lighter.

That’s all (see wallpaper)!

Author: Vlad Gerasimov
URL:    http://www.vladstudio.com

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