This is an attempt by photoshop/4106" id="tag" title="">Dr. Photoshop to recreate the default wallpaper for Mac OS X called Aqua Blue. It will help if you have the original picture of the Mac wallie in front of you as you work for real time comparison. It may not be much but it is something to call your own. Just add your own touch to this wallpaper classic.

1. Create a new document that is double the size for your intended project. In this example it is 5000 pixels x 5000 pixels. Use #0A5FAF as a fill for the background.
2. Create a new layer.
3. Expand the window making a large margin outside the document canvas.
4. Using the pen tool, make a curve that starts outside the document and ends outside of it as well.
5. Right click or Ctrl Click on the pen path and fill the path with white or #FFFFFF.
6. Apply a stroke effect of about 1 to 5 px depending on the size of the document.
7. Adjust the fill to about 10-30%
8. Repeat Steps 2-7 a couple of times.
9. Duplicate each layer for safety measure. Just hide the original so no changes will take effect on it. Also, so you won't have to re-do every layer in case you make a mistake.
10. Apply a mask to the newly rasterized layer (you can find the button in the bottom of the layer palette). Take the gradient tool and set it to black to white and blending mode darken. On the layer mask, apply gradients by clicking and dragging. By setting the blending mode to darken, you can apply the gradient multiple times and it will not undo the region masked region created on the gradient you dragged out just before. This would not be true if it were normal. You want to leave the center and the middle of the stroke mostly intact and hide the ends and sections not close the the line.

Download: [How to Video]

If you're a Windows user, then this sight is pretty familiar to you.

But if you're a city dweller like me, then wouldn't you want this as wallpaper instead?

Inspired by very interesting cloud formations, Sam Javanrouh took this image of a city landscape in Canada. The image was made with only one exposure. The post processing involves various adjustment layers including channel mixer, curves and selective dodging and burning in Photoshop. Here's a "before/after processing" of the raw photo.