How to create a neon strand marble effect

[janhavelka]

Hi All,

I would like to create a smilar random color strand pattern effect as in the attached image. Any helpful hints or directions are most welcome (the fine color strand effect is the part Im stuck on).

Thanks, sending positive karma

[J E L]

Hi @janhavelka Well, I'll give this a start for you! You might check this tutorial from Graphicxtras for some ideas and inspiration. Let us know if that's helpful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pw7Z3_uBKTI

[janhavelka]

Tnx for the reply, the tutorials is insightful but none of the steps pertain to the original effect in the sample i posted.

Much appreciated but im still stumped, in the end i think its an AI generated image.

[J E L]

Sure, I agree it's not going to be an easy thing to create and I don't know if Photoshop is the app to get you where you want to go. But you never know what someone else may suggest!

[rayek.elfin]

This wasn't done with AI: the original file was uploaded to Shutterstock in 2019 (before AI imaging was a thing). It is probably created with some kind of procedural texture generator. FilterForge, Substance Designer, and Material Maker are examples.

Filter Forge is a Photoshop plugin: https://filterforge.com/

For example, I assigned a gradient map with colours based on the above image to one of the electricity examples:

But the original probably combines multiple textures (a distorted tile/voronoi noise and a smoke texture) with manual masking and cloning of those whisps of smoke.

Here I generated three different textures in layers using Filter Forge: two smoke/whisp textures ("Whisp" and "Smoke and Vapours" and "Crackle Snippet"). I adjusted the settings to my liking, and then used basic masking and layer duplication/transformation to create the following result:

This comes closer to the original. To generate straighter lines would require a different procedural noise/texture. And duplicating the smoke whisps would take longer to make it look nicer. I only played around for a few minutes here to present a starting point for you.

PS instead of Filter Forge you could search the net for similar looking textures.

[Mylenium]

The basic Voronoi pattern can easily be created using the Crystallize filter followed by a Find Edges and some tweaking, then applying soem adjustments and e.g. a Gradient Map adjustment. Similarly, the blue whisps are likely just some fractal noise pattern run through a paint style filter, tweaked and colored and then run through a final Displacment Map effect with the cracked shards as an input map. It's basically doable with vanilla PS, it will just require some experimentation to figure out all the parameters and settings.

Mylenium