This was made in Adobe Photoshop CS2 but should work for other versons, more or less. This tutorials requires a familiarity of Photoshop.

First I pick my two photos and arrange them on the black canvas. Next I erase away parts of them on a layer mask.

Next, I want to add some depth and interest to the negative space and I really like the pipes in the right pic and the little red blops in the left pic, so I duplicate those layers and place them in various places, using rotate, to give everyting a new direction. There are five or six layers of this extra stuff, making ten layers for the whole piece so far.

Next, I am going to add a gradient layer because I find it easier to see where I am going once I have my color scheme more or less set. This one was pretty easy to color. I didn’t have to lay around with the settings at all; I just chose the eigth gradient in my Mix N’ Match set and set it to reverse and really loved the colors. So that’s it.

Now I want to add a stock image of some candles. I size it down and apply the median filter at 17, add a layer mask and erase areas of it. Additonally, I also adjust the color using the Hue/Saturation selection; I just tone down the red as well as bring down the Lightness.

Now I notice that the piping on the right picture looks a little harsh comparitvely to the rest of the piece. SO I am going to slect that portion of the pic and apply some median at 4.

I also am going to add a little bit of the Tweaker filter by XeroGraphics to the pictures of Matt and Audrey. It doesn’t change anything drastically, it just brightens it up slightly. So now I am taking another stock photo–this time of light streaks–and placing it over all the image layer. It’s very red so I am going to tone it down like I did with the candle picture. I am also going to use Selective Color, selecting Yellow from the drop down menu, and moving the bottom level (Black) all the way to the left. I will do this three times and it get rid of all of the yellow in the streaks.

Next, I am going to size down the light streak picture a bit and desaturate it a little bit more and then set the opacity to 44% and also Auto Contrast it. I am also going use the burn tool and run along the edges.

Now for a little brushwork. I am going to use Brush “132″ in my set Randomness 3 and then on my brushes palette I select the options: Shape Dynamics and Scattering. Below are the settings I’ve chosen for Shape Dynamics.

Then I run the brush along the left side, using white as my color ad the layer opacity set at 22%. And I add text. Now, for the text, I am using two fonts, Corleone Due and Charlesworth. I use the Edit > Transform >> Skew function and slant the text. I want to have large spacing between the letters so I set the spacing at various intervals in the thousands on my text palette. And I use some drop shadow and various gradients on them. It just takes a bit of fiddling around to get the effects I want.

And then I am done! I flatten my layer, duplicate it, add some smart sharpen and then go to Edit >> Fade to Soft Light at 34%.