Those of you who swung by the site near the Y2K rollover will recognize this as the basis of a splash page image ("Happy Damn Millennium") I had up, but this image dates back to the fall of 1998.

I've always had a fascination with A-bombs, and while I'm glad atomic holocaust is something we've so far managed to avoid, a mushroom cloud makes for a pretty cool image. I stumbled across a site a long while back that detailed the history of United States atomic bomb tests, and included photographs and such. I grabbed one of the images and decided to see what techniques I could come up with to distress the picture.

First thing I did is add those shafts of light through the bottom blast wave - in Photoshop, I added a radial zoom blur (with the center being the mushroom of the cloud) to a copy of the image, then deleted all but the part I wanted to keep. I copied a composite of what I had to a new layer, on which I added a muted lens flare. On another new layer, I added a ton of noise and contrast. Another layer contained a lighting effect that effectively blew out the center of the image and dropped the edges away to black. I then created a new layer to wash out the color of the image down to an aged, sepia-like tone. Liberal experimentation with adjustments to these layers' opacities and blending options yeilded a combination I was happy with.

To create the really distressed outer edge, I drew a rough grey border shape on another layer with a soft, blurry paintbrush. I erased small chunks of this edge to give it character. Then, I copied that layer and changed the blending setting of it to Difference. I erased parts of that difference layer, to create new interference and to make the burn-out more interesting. Doing that gave me the majority of the frame. On another new layer, set to Exclusion, I sprayed on top of that border with a soft airbrush to create the another interesting effect. To this layer, I also added a bunch of noise to simulate grain.

To add 'age' to the image, I decided to add what look like were scratches in the negative, and remnants of cellophane tape and adhesive around the edges of the picture. The scratches are straight lines (on a layer set to 'Lighten') of various opacities. To get the 'tape glue' look, I created a new layer and would randomly select rectangular areas with the marquee tool that I then painted inside of with the paintbrush set to 'wet edges.' I did this multiple times, for each piece of tape. Adjusting the opacity of that level finalized the effect.