I have the most recent US release edition of Advance Photoshop...why did I buy it when I'm no where near the "advance" part of the title, is anyones guess...I saw a little tut in there on how to make a water caustic effect and I thought to myself "Hey I could do that!" I am following the so called easy steps and there is alot of read between the lines as it is an Advance photoshop thingy but anyway not to slide off topic here...

Starts off with creating a 1000x1000 pixel psd of clouds. I got that. Then tells you to start a new file also of the same size. Then to set the background to 50% gray and foreground to white. Then use Filter > texture > stained glass and set the cell size to 46 and border to 2 and the light intestity to 0. Did all that. Then it tells me to go to filter > sketch > stamp and with a light-dark balance of 9 and smoothness to 13. This is where I am launched into orbit. The file I'm working on goes completely white. I've lost the stained glass effect. Following the steps and the white screen doesn't changed. So I decided to skip that part.

Next part says to use filter > distort > displace and load the Cloud file we made first. There are some options in the Displace window that the tut doesn't cover [Guess it's that Advance thing again] It just says to set horizontal and vertical scale to 25. I selected "tile" and "Wrap around" after a few tries.  Says to duplicate the layer and set the mode to linear dodge. At this point I have lost all my white lines to almost nothing. Then it says to run Motion blur at an angle of -35 and distance of 60 and to move the layer slightly down and to the right. Then repeat displacement. [Maybe it's the Advance thing again, do I start a new layer and repeat everything? or use the displacement on top of the layer I'm working on?]

Then it says to add a blue background, Well, for starters you can't even begin to use the stained glass effect unless you have some kind of color on your background. The Tut has a black but the end result is this pretty dark blue. I can't get black to change colors by using Hue so I decide to try again and start with a colored back ground. This way I can change it with the Hue.

That is pretty much the tutorial in the magazine. I like the effect the book has but I don't come anywhere near it. Granted I am pretty sure you have to do several layers to get a finished look, but I"m kind of stuck. So didn't know if any Adobe guru whiz here could give it a stab and fill in the blanks for me. I did a search prior to posting and I didn't see anything that resembled this.

I am using Photoshop 8

Thanks for your help :) 

Attached Link: Caustics Generator

Here is an even easier way

Well, I haven't seen the tut or the effect it tries to get, but I followed your instructions (with some changes) and got this. No idea if that's anywhere near what was intended. But frankly, if you want a caustics texture I would follow Luke's advice and use the excellent and free caustics generator.

Yeah the Caustics Generator is awesome. You can animate as well and create tiling images.

 i tend to want to have as much control as possible which is why i often do things the hard way. but i have to agree with Steve, i'd had great results with the generator. 

sometimes when we come up with a "how-to" tutorial on some effect, we forget to document every step and once to results don't match up with the example the whole thing spirals down the toilet.

retrocity

heh thanks for the replies :) I'll check out the generator, the picture in the magazine looked neat and I thought it might be something "easy" to do since the tut looked so short when I looked at it and now I know why...oh well :)