Here’s a quick little tutorial showing how to make a combination of gradient and grunge that can look stylish in any color (blue is just an example, feel free to experiment). What you need to know is only the basic tools of photoshop that are available from the left toolbar. And some basic layer skills (blending modes, opacities). This tutorial ALSO works in Pixelmator and works exactly the same so you can duplicate all the steps. Enjoy!
Ok let’s start shall we? Let’s create an image say : 900×700 pixels and fill the background layer with a radial (circle!) gradient of two shades of blue like below. To have the ligher color on top just start the gradient from top-center and holding the mouse button move down until the effect is desired.
For the sake of it let’s make another layer, do a similar gradient but starting from the top-left corner of the screen like so:
Change the blending mode to Multiply and with a soft eraser remove as much of this layer as possible for it to add a little “variation” to the one below. I left mostly the top left corner and deleted nearly all the rest.
Then let’s add a grunge texture from our free textures library (you can find it and many other useful textures in this websites “free textures section” enjoy!).
Set it to either overlay or multiplay blending modes, lower the opacity to say 15 / 20% and with the soft eraser remove a little bit from the left side, the right side and a bit more from the bottom. Leaving the texture mostly on top-center parts of the image.
Now this is one of my favorite tricks. Create a new layer, set the blending mode to Overlay or Color Dodge. Make a selection like the one below:
Now with a soft, white brush paint at the top part of the selection to form something like this:
The effect is pretty nice but a bit too “in your face” so with a very large, soft eraser delete some of the image from the sides, the bottom, and with a lower opacity eraser remove a bit from here and there so it’ll blend more with the background.
Now we can add some title over it and some other text underneath to make it all work. This looks pretty nice with some added images, more text and different backgrounds, especially in print. So go, have fun, enjoy and experiment! Remember that you don’t need to follow that precisely to have a nice result, make something a little bit differently and see what happens. Cheers!