Cool Band Wallpaper

1) Find a picture of a band or of anyone really, as i have used this one of Stereophonics... and paste it into a new document 1024 (width) x 768 (height). Fill this background in with the colour #0040ae.

2) Use the quick selection tool to select ONLY the people in the photo, and put them in a new layer (right click>layer from copy).

3) Hide the layer with the original photo, and blur the edges of the people, just enough to make them look like they aren't taken from another image. You can change the display options of this layer but I have kept it to normal.

4) Download a nice brush preset (the one I used can be found here (last brush)) and stick it in the middle of the image at the diametre of 1024 px and colour of #003477.

5) Add the name of the band in text, making it look good and exciting. With mine I added an outer glow of size 5 and opacity 75%. I added a gradient overlay of BG - FG keeping the 2 colours from earlier in the tutorial. I then duplicated the text layer and on the bottom layer I added a gaussian blur with radius of 4.0 px.

Animated Pre-loader

1) Make a new document, with dimensions 200x200 px. Give this document any name you wish. 2) Make a new group, which you should call Bars. Select the rounded rectange tool, under the rectange tool menu, and set the radius to 10 px. Inside this group, make a drawing with the colour #999999, then rasterize it to make it look like this;

3) Duplicate this layer 11 times (until you have 12 of these layers), rotate them and move them until you get something like this; DO NOT WORRY ABOUT IT BEING UNEVEN!

4) Select the ellipse tool, under the rectangle tool menu, and make a selection about this big and place it roughly in the middle of the image; 5) Keeping our last selection, delete each line in turn by clicking on the layer you wish to dlete the line from, and press delete on your keyboard. Merge the layers. You should end up with something like this;

6) Right, lets create the highlight for the pre-loader by making a triangular selection;

7) Make a new group and call it Highlight. Then make a new layer with the triangular selection still up. Change the foreground colour to #595959, and select the gradient tool. Set it to the reflected gradient and make the gradient foreground to transparent. make this gradient by making the line start in the middle of the triangle and making it end on either edge;
8) Duplicate this layer so you have 12 of these gradients. Keep moving and rotating them until you get each triangle to have its point on the middle of the opoosite bar.

9) Select every point of the bars (ctrl+shift+click on each layer image), and select the inverse (ctrl+shift+I). On every gradient delete this part until you are left with this;
10) Open up the animation toolbar (Window>Animation), and on the first frame hide all gradient layers escept the first one. Add a new frame once you have done this and add on the gradient that goes next clockwise in the circle. Hide the the last gradient layer and then repeat this for the whole way round.

11) If you want you can change the colour of this easily by upressing ctrl+U, clicking colourize, and choosing the colour. See below for the two possible final products.