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Before we begin, this tutorial will show you my attempt at recreating the os x wallpaper eye candy. I have no clue to the actual process of creating the wallpaper, but I believe this closely recreates (and I hope you do too) the effect with relative ease.

1. Create a new document, about twice the size of its intended purpose. I used 5000 px x 5000 px. Fill the background with color #0A5FAF.

2. Create a new layer.

3. Expand the window so there is a large margin outside the document canvas. (You'll see why in step 4)

4. Take the pen tool, and make a curve that starts and ends outside the document. Close the pen path outside the canvas.

5. Right Click (or ctrl click for the mac) on the pen path and 'fill path...'. Fill it with white.

6. Apply a stroke effect of about 1 to 5 px depending on the size of the document.

7. Bring the fill down to about 10 - 30 %

8. Repeat steps 2-7 a bunch of times to fill up the document with this.

9. Personally I like to separate each layer into a folder so I can easily create a change in the next steps with having to recreate each layer from scratch.

10. Duplicate each layer in side each folder. Hide the original. Create a new blank layer and merge this new layer with the duplicate so that the effect 'f' will no longer be applyed for that layer. Basically your rasterizing the layer.

11. Apply a mask to the newly rasterized layer (you can find the button in the bottom of the layer palette). Take the gradient tool and set it to black to white and blending mode darken. On the layer mask, apply gradients by clicking and dragging. By setting the blending mode to darken, you can apply the gradient multiple times and it will not undo the region masked region created on the gradient you dragged out just before. This would not be true if it were normal. You want to leave the center and the middle of the stroke mostly intact and hide the ends and sections not close the the line.

12. Take the blur tool and start to heavily blur the ends of the stroke line and partially blur the middle of the stroke line.

13. For extra taste and eye candy, create a new layer above all. Create a gradient that is either linear or radial with the colors being black and white. Set this layer to overlay and bring down the opacity to around 40%.

(1280x1024)

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Discuss the Adobe Photoshop tutorials on the forums. You can find the photoshop files to download there too.