Introduction to Making Cool Wallpapers
You have probably seen some very cool "abstract" art on the internet that was made in photoshop, maybe some cool wallpaper that has an awesome design on it or something like that. There is a technique that I use to make unique and abstract looking wallpapers, its so simple that a monkey could do it, but the outcome is always very beautiful!

Final Outcome after 5 steps:



Step 1. Create a new document
If you are going to make a wallpaper you will want to make the resolution of this document the same size as your monitor. A quick way to do this is to press the Print Screen key on your keyboard, and then CTRL+N to make a new document, this should set the new document size to match the resolution of your monitor. If it doesn't just enter the size yourself, in my case I will be using 1920x1200. If you intend on sharing your wallpapers on your website, you may want to make the original very large like I do, so that you can share several sizes.

Step 2. Choose some colors
On your toolbar or in your color pallete you will want to now choose a foreground and background color. It can be anything really, just make sure they are a bit different for the best effect, I like black and white, orange and blue, red and green, stuff like that, but just pick any 2 colors you like :)


Step 3. Set up a gradient
After you have chosen your colors, click the gradient button on your toolbar (or press hotkey G). At the top of the window you should see a dropdown menu with several different gradients in it, one of the first ones should be the forground/background color gradient, which will blend between both of your chosen colors. Go ahead and select this gradient. A bit right of the dropdown menu you will see 5 gradient styles, we want the circle one for now.  and to the right of that you will see a "mode" dropdown list, click it and select "difference" from the list.

Step 4. Use your gradient. Alot!
This is the fun part! With the gradient tool set up and selected, click somewhere on your canvas and hold the mouse down, drag your mouse a bit and then let go. You just made a gradient! But the next one is where it gets interesting, make another gradient on top of your old one. See how the colors inverted? Looks kinda cool huh. Well, it will look even cooler if you try it a few more times! Every time you make a gradient, all the colors should invert, which makes for some really amazing effects. Try dragging the gradients out at all sizes and you can make some cool stuff.

One gradient, using orange and blue	After about 20 gradients! Pretty!

Step 5. Run some filters
You don't have to do this step, but if your new wallpaper still seems kinda boring, it can certainly spice it up. Just wander on over to the filters drop down menu and play around with some of the different available filters, adding them to your already abstract effects can produce some awesome digital designs. When playing with the filters, I suggest you first duplicate the layer your design is on, and use the filters on your new copy, this way you can also make use of the blending mode dropdown for the layer, which will blend your new filtered design with your old originl gradient design. This dropdown is located at the top left of the layers window, I usually try overlay first, it blends two layers very nicely.

Final Thoughts
I hope that was as easy as I made it out to be! There are alot of things to mess around with here that can make very different outcomes, try different styles and modes for your gradient, play around with the colors, and especially the filters. Hope you enjoyed this quick tutorial!