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Every 4th of July, my wife looks forward to going to see a public display of fireworks in San Francisco. Unfortunately, it rained all day this year and then the public display was cancelled. I didn’t want to disappoint her. But there was nothing I could do. Or… Right! I launched Adobe Photoshop CS2. In a matter of 5 minutes or so, I developed fireworks in the nightly sky.

The following tutorial shows steps to create a fireworks display in the sky. The photo used in this tutorial comes from PD Photo.

1. Make a selection with Ellipse Marquee Tool. It will be your choice to apply several pixels of Feather.
2. Choose two colors for foreground and background. While the selection is active, choose Filter > Render > Clouds.
3. We want some minute pixels of space. So choose Filter > Noise > Add Noise. Add noise with Uniform Distribution.
4. You can now release the selection. Next, we need to enlarge each pixel with a color. So choose Filter > Pixelate > Crystallize. Adjust the cell size slider all the way to the left.
5. Another important step is to cast Radial Blur.
6. Okay. Finally, Use Levels to adjust bright and dark pixels and then change the blend mode to get rid of extreme dark pixels. Which mode to use depends on your final work. Try using Color Dodge, Linear Dodge or Hard Light. Furthermore, you also want to use Hue/Saturation to change colors and increase saturation a little bit.

Video tutorial with no audio commentary

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Photoshop CS2 is a product of Adobe Systems Incorporated.