Create a weird colored star thing in Photoshop

This tutorial will show you how to create the most beautiful image you have ever seen. I’m serious. There is nothing you could ever like more than this.

Ok, now that you’ve seen it, there is nothing you would rather do more than make this image. This is not a question.

Step 1:
Create a blank 20×15 pixel image. That’s right. PIXELS. It’s going to be small. Then go to Filter -> Noise -> Add Noise. Add some colored noise. Here is a zoomed-in version of what it should look like:

Step 2:
Go to Image -> Image Size, and resize this image to something more useful, like say, 1200 pixels wide. It should look like this:

Step 3:
It looks pretty dumb. Go to Filter -> Pixelate -> Crystallize, and choose a cell size of about 50 pixels. Experiment with it.

It looks a little better now.

Step 4:
Now we need some empty space around the colors. Double-click the “Background” layer to turn it into a regular layer. Then either enlarge the canvas to add space around the image, or shrink the layer. Your choice. It should look like this now.

Step 5:
Now go to Filter -> Blur -> Radial Blur. Change the blur method to “zoom,” change the amount to 100, and change the quality to best. After it does its thing, do it again. (Press CTRL+F to repeat the last filter.)

Step 6:
Now comes the tricky part. We’re going to do Glowing Edges to this. Go to Filter -> Stylize -> Glowing Edges. Play with the width and brightness a bit to see what happens. I ended up only increasing the brightness slightly. After you do that, you’ll end up with this.

Step 7:
If you invert the layer, then all the black turns to white, and since the colors were just random anyway, they don’t look a whole lot different.

Now you can use this in other images, and it’s even got transparency so it will blend nicely, or you can add a solid white background to finish it off.

You can tweak the colors to match whatever project you’re working on by playing with the curves for red, green and blue. You can completely remove the green for example, if green would clash with the rest of your image.