Oh lord, what have I done?!?!
Here's one of the first I did - actually I think it is
the first. I learned the technique from someone who participated in a "Flip 'n Blend" photo challenge on another site. There are things you can do to take this
way beyond simple twirls and it can get insane ... and pretty darn cool. Follow along if you dare/care...
Original
Results after the basic set of Twirl instructions in the tutorial linked above
OK, so this is cool, but rather unbalanced. Now, the "Flip 'n Blend" challenge was all about taking a photo and then duplicating, rotating, flipping and blending the photo on itself to create something abstract. So, I took this, duplicated it as a new layer, flipped it vertically, and applied a
Darker Color blend mode...
Next I naturally asked, "What would happen if I rotated it and did it again?" This is what I got with a Overlay blend more and then some levels adjusting to remove the darkness.
At this point I saved my work and went back to Lr because I wanted to crop it square to remove the excess and the file was getting huge already so I didn't want the excess stuff on the sides floating around if I cropped but didn't delete the cropped section (I like non-destructive edits). While there I applied some Clarity and Contrast adjustments, did some sharpening and played with it some more. I then sent it back to Photoshop where I did some additional edits on the now flattened file in Color Efex Pro 4.
Because it was 3:30AM and I was in the midst of a battle with insomnia I then decided (IIRC - the steps are lost), why not pull the shadows and send it to Topaz Glow and see what happens. I took the result and blended it in Color mode to get this.
So here, once again I saved my work and went back to Lr thinking I was done. And I was for a couple hours, at which point I thought, "What the hell else can I do with this?!"
I go back to my previous image and send it back to Ps and say, "Let's twirl it again!!", which I do, and it's cool but the center is rather bright (I'm going to save on posting some intermediate steps here). I then decide to send it to Silver Efex Pro to see what blending it with a B&W of itself will do. I don't get the contrast I want from the normal Luminosity mode blend I do, but in Darken I get some very distinct detail in the center. I replicate the B&W layer and blend again with a Multiple mode which was also cool on its own and it now makes the center pop but everything else is WAY too dark. On goes the layer mask and now I have this...
It's a little too defined so I change the blend mode to
Lighter Color and put a gradient mask on to keep the edges darker. Now more flip 'n bend. Here I've lost the steps in my workflow because I flattened some steps. IIRC, I used a Camera Raw or other Distortion filter to enlarge the center section, then duplicated, rotated, blended and wound up with this (after replicating the result, going to Silver Efex Pro 2 and applying a Luminosity mask to only the white sections since they were getting very hot)...
(
Edit Note: looking at it again I see a seam running between 10 & 11 o'clock so I now vaguely remember either doing some sort of replication, extraction, tiny world sort of nonsense. I still can't tell you what, but it was more than just a simple distortion.)
But wait, there's more!! I decide to replicate it and rotate it 45 degrees and blend again (I'm thinking Lighter Color, but it's lost). Because I get hard edges on the 45 degree rotation I need to apply another gradient mask to hide the lines. Then back to Lr where I crop in about 10% boost the clarity, shadows, and saturation, and sharpen. Voila!!
I could have stopped at a lot of points along the line, which speaks to the potential insanity built in to this effect. Still, it's a great way to beat the boredom some days. LOL