Step 1

|
Open a new image which is 100 x 100 pixels with a black background. |
|
Step 2 |
With the selection tool set to ellipse and anti-alias, draw an ellipse
which fills most of the frame. |
|
Step 3 
|
Add 100% uniform noise to the ellipse. Do this again
to get more. |
|
Step 4 |
Under Image-Other, go to Mosaic. Set the block width and height to
4. |
 |
Step 5 
|
Go to Colors-Adjust and pull up the Hue/Saturation/Lightness
adjustment. I left the hue alone and pushed the Saturation and Lightness to +100%.
You can play around with this for different effects. |
 |
Step 6 |
Now go to Gaussian Blur under the Image menu with a radius of about
2.0. This may sound strange, but I then did a Sharpen filter. |
 |
Step 7 
|
At this point, its time to get a bit more "dimensionality" to
the opal. You can do this with the cutout filter. Use a black shadow with
opacity around 60 and don't fill with a color. Make the blur around 18 and the
offset -3, -3. (Play around with all of this.) |
|
Step 8 |
Add a new layer, but keep the ellipse selected. In the upper left,
spray on a white arc. Turnoff the visibility of the background layer. Use
Gaussian blur just on this layer and set the radius to 1.5. Now, reduce the layer
opacity to about 40. |
 |
Notes 
|
- You may want to resize the image down to a smaller size.
- It might be interesting to flood fill the ellipse with another color before adding the
random noise.
- I also created opals from a white "blank", but got carried away with the
embellishments which you see on this page which is why you got black, this time.
<G>
- I'd like to do some more complicated things with shifting the hues.
|
|