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We are going to show you how to do an effect that in this tutorial will be used to make an avatar or link button, but this particular effect also works extremely well for wallpapers and backgrounds.

Start with a 500 by 500 file in RGB mode (if you want to use this effect on a wallpaper, use whatever resolution you need and preferably more so you can pick whichever part of the image you like best). Set the background to black. Now take out your pen tool, choose the ellipse tool and draw random white circles.

Go to Blur - Radial Blur and set to 100, Zoom, Good. Repeat this effect, but change the amount to 50 this time. Doesn't look very spectacular, does it? Just wait, it's coming.

Now go to Sketch - Chrome. Set the detail to 10 and the smoothness to 10 and hit OK. That's beginning to look more exciting, isn't it? You can choose to invert the image now, but you may leave out this step. To invert, hit Ctrl and I.

This is where the experimenting begins. Duplicate your layer and Distort - Twirl the first with -100 and the next with +100. Set the top layer to Overlay, Screen or whatever you like best. Keep merging layers, duplicating and rotating them until you get something that looks intriguing to you.

Lastly, you need to play around with the colours. You may play around with the colour balance, the hue and saturation or you can add a colour layer. We prefer adding Colour Balance adjustment layer to the whole, so we can always undo it. Add several to get multiple colours into your image instead of just one colour in several hues. Now, choose whichever part of the image you like best and crop it. A popular size for avatars is 450 by 35, link buttons are a standard 88 by 31. Add a border, text, whatever you like.