Wallpaper: Inside the binary

In this tutorial we'll be creating a wallpaper made of lots of ones and zeroes for the true computer geeks :) It's a very simple tutorial with a beautiful result so check it out - here's what we're going to create:

OK so let's begin. Create a new document with dimentions to match your resolution. Mine is 1280x800. Fill the background with black (press D for default colors, press ALT+BACKSPACE to fill). Rename the only layer to background or back or something like that. Now take the text tool

from the tools palette, set the foreground color to white and use the following settings:

Now we need to create a bunch of ones and zeroes and most importantly make them look random. As i'm a very lazy person, this task is enormously difficult for me :) For a 1280x800 wallpaper you'll need 26 lines of text, each of them containing 15 ones or zeroes, separated by 5 spaces. You can either do this manually (write a number, add 5 spaces, write another number etc ...) or use my random string generator that i've created some time ago to generate passwords and stuff like that. You can download the random string generator from my website here. The program doesn't need any installation so you can simply delete it after you're done. After downloading and launching the program, use the following settings:

For thoes who have difficulties reading the downsized image:
Alphabet: 01
Number of characters per line: 15
Number of lines: 26
Separator: 5 spaces

Press Generate to generate 26 lines of random numbers, separated by 5 spaces and then press Copy Result to copy the text to clipboard. If you're using a different resolution, your settings will be different! The idea here is to generate lots of text to take up almost all the wallpaper. You can now exit the program and return to photoshop. Click with the text tool on the top left corner of the document and paste the text:

Now we need to rasterize this text and center it. Zoom out so that you could see the entire image. Right click on the text layer and select Rasterize Type. Rename the text layer to text. Finally, press CTRL+A, CTRL+X, CTRL+V. This will quickly cut and paste the text centered vertically and horizontally. So now we have two layers: the background and the text. Let's add some motion to the numbers. Press CTRL+J to duplicate the text layer and select the lower layer. Now go to Filter > Blur > Radial Blur ... and apply it with the following settings:

Here's what you should get:

There should be a slight blur applied to the lower text layer, but we need to resize it a little to make a motion illusion. If you zoomed this image in, you would see that in some places the blur comes before the text and in the motion case it should come after the original text. That is when you see a motion blur effect on for example a car - there's a picture of a car, followed by its blurred "tail". And in our case we have our blurred "tail" preceding the actual text:

To fix this problem we can apply a simple and lazy trick: downsize the blur a little. Since we have a radial blur and it's comming from the center of the document, the downsizing trick will do just fine. So select the lower text layer and press CTRL+T to transform. Now in the tool settings panel on the top of Photoshop's window, lock the aspect ratio and downsize to about 99%-98% by clicking and dragging either W or H letters as shown in this picture:

This will result in a pretty good blur like this:

Now that that's done, select both of the text layers and merge them (CTRL+E). Now try to not get confused on the next steps. First thing to do is create a copy of your text layer (CTRL+J) and hide it:

Now with the lower text layer selected, press CTRL+T to transform, hold SHIFT and ALT keys and drag one of the corner transformation handles inwards to downsize the text like this:

As you can see, i've downsized the text quite a lot. Press ENTER to apply the transformation and let's go to another step. Now this next step will be repeated a number of times so try to understand how it's done: there's really nothing difficult here, maybe just confusing a bit. Select the hidden text layer,make a copy (CTRL+J) and select the lower hidden layer:

Now unhide the selected layer and downsize it like you did before. Only this time, make the text a little bigger:

Repeat the same process a couple of times until you have something like this:

You'll have to repeat the steps a few times, depending on how bigger you make the text with every step, but that's totally up to you. As long as you don't get confused between the layers, everything's OK. Basically the process you're repeating simply creates a bigger text layer on top of all the other smaller text layers. But eventually you'll come up to a point when there's nowhere to downsize and the last step will be almost the same as all the rest, except that instead of downsizing you'll need to upsize the text:

As you can see in the picture above, the last layer of text is a little larger that it originally was, but it still remains within the bounds of the actual document. You might want to upsize it even more, that's completely up to you. So now we have our base effect:

Select all the text layers (including the hidden one, or you can delete it if you want) and press CTRL+E to merge them. Once again you'll end up with one text layer and a background. Create a new layer on top of everyghing else and name it lighting. Grab the brush tool

from the tools palette, set the foreground to white and use these settings:

Yes, you got it right: it's a completely opaque soft round 200 pixel brush. Go to Window > Brushes and add some shape dynamics:

Now draw some stuff like in the picture below on the document (just make sure you're on the lighting layer):

Basically it's something like a cardiogram :) Then go back to the brushes engine (Window > Brushes) and disable shape dynamics. Now press Image > Rotate Canvas > 90 CCW. Your image will be rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise. Next thing is to apply some "wind" from both horizontal directions. To do that, go to Filter > Stylize > Wind ... and apply it with these settings:

Go back to the same filter again, but this time change the direction to from the left. Rotate the image back to what it was (Image > Rotate Canvas > 90 CW) and you should have something like this now:

Finally, let's add some more blur to it. Go to Filter > Blur > Motion Blur ... and apply it with these settings:

The lighting effect should now soften a little:

Next thing to do is add some color to the light. To do that, lock the transparent pixels of the lighting layer by pressing the lock transparent pixels button

in the layers panel. Grab the brush tool again, change its opacity to a very low value (~5%), size to ~500px and color to ... well ... whatever you want. I used a yellow-ish color for the left size of the light, then red for the middle and blue for the right side. So if you want to do it exactly like i did, use a yellow color and paint on the left side of the lighting until you have something like this:

Then some red color in the middle:

And some blue on the right side:

You can't really screw things up here so be creative and use the colors you like in the places you want. To achieve the final result, two more steps are required. First, make a copy of the lighting layer, set its blending mode to screen and opacity to ~20%. Second, change the blending mode of the original lighting layer to color burn.

That's it! Here's the final result:

Enjoy!