Create the Vista Aurora wallpapers in Photoshop

If you’ve ever used Windows Vista which I’m sure most of you have you will at some point have come across the Windows Vista aurora effect wallpapers which the operating system is very well known for. These aurora wallpapers are fantastic to look at and yet they are incredibly simple to create.

Of course the advantage of creating your own HD wallpapers such as the one we’re going to create in this Photoshop wallpaper tutorial is that you can create them exactly how you like. Although we do have a fantastic collection of HD wallpapers right here on this site it’s always good to make your own allowing you to personalize it as much as you want to.

So what are we waiting for? Let’s get started with creating a fantastic and beautiful Windows Vista aurora effect HD desktop wallpaper by following this step-by-step Photoshop wallpaper tutorial.

Grab a HD wallpaper

It may be a bit strange but to create this wallpaper we actually first start out with an existing wallpaper. You’ll want to find one which is very colourful and busy with lots of variation. A perfect example of the type to use would be landscape or scenery wallpapers as they always have a lot going on in them. For this example we’re going to use this Summer Sun Rays scenic wallpaper.

Forest HD Wallpaper

Blur it

With our new found wallpaper opened up in Photoshop and resized to the exact size you want we’re going to apply some filters to it. Photoshop filters are a way of making adjustments to the image quickly and easily without worrying too much about what’s going on in the background.

Simply go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. From here we can blur the image which we’ll do now. Feel free to play around with the radius setting but I went with the number 70 producing the following result. I liked the effect so much I even created a blurred HD wallpaper out of it.

Blurred HD Wallpaper

Adjust the colours

Now that we have the blurred base of our wallpaper we’re going to inject some fantastic colours into our wallpapers. Here’s what you need to do for this part.

Go to Layer > New Adjustment Layour > Color Balance. In the little popup that appears just click OK. A little window should have opened up entitled ‘Properties’. This little windows contains three different sliders which lets you adjust the amount of cyan, magenta and yellow in the image. This is where you take control for just a minute – move each of the three sliders around and see what happens. Keep doing this until you see a result you’re happy with.

I went for lots of blue. If you’d like to adjust it some more you can even change the tone from the ‘Tone’ dropdown just above. For each of the tones keep adjusting the three sliders until you’re satisfied.

Blue blurred wallpaper

Adding some style

Now that the base or background is complete we need to actually make this into the aurora effect wallpaper. Using the marquee tool make a selection spanning right across the image so that only a little of the curvature is visible. You should do this so that roughly the top half of the image is selected.

Create a new layer by going to Layer > New > Layour and click OK to the little popup. Using the brush tool with a size setting of about 300 pixels and a hardness value of 0, select white as your foreground colour and brush vertically along the line just inside the selected area.

With this layer still selected, change the blending mode to ‘overlay’. You should see what happens, basically our selection turns into a curved line across the wallpaper. All we really need to do now is position it properly. Using the transform tool simply drag and rotate that line so that it is near vertical through your wallpaper.

Right click on the layer and duplicate it. Rotate it just a tiny bit more or less and move it again. Do this several times until you’ve got the desired effect. And that’s all there is. You’ve successfully created a fantastic looking HD aurora effect wallpaper. This is what mine looks like.

HD photoshop wallpaper tutorial