I am in a Facebook group:  TWIRL THIS!!
It's a group for doing these kinds of Digital Edits.

I get asked a lot how I do what I do, how do I make the images I make... Etc..

In order to help people out in the group, I have put this little tutorial together.

MASTER / INITIAL IMAGE - Load this into Photoshop (we will be using PS for this, but i am assuming you know you to do some basic things, layers, masks, copy layers, mirror, flips)

Master ImageMaster Image

I always work on a 3000x3000 pixel canvas - so i redid my canvas to 3000x3000.

In order to get the "twirl" I wanted I redid the image (copying it, rotating it and stretching it) to look like this:

initial-image

Once I had this, I used an "action" that I built a while back to make this twirl.  If you want more info on the settings for "twirling" visit this blog page

initial-twirl

You will notice that the twirl kind of follows the way the image was top left to bottom right.

From here you have a lot of option, Make a copy (always 1st) then flip:

twirl-VerticalVERTICAL COPY twirl-horizontalHORIZONTAL COPY

From this I decided I liked the VERTICAL Twirl.  Took it, shrank the layers and rotated them 90 deg.

Layers are set to "LIGHTEN" to allow them to blend better.

Image-1Twirl rotated and shrunk

To keep the "mirroring" going, I flipped the above image over.

Vert-Before-MaskFlipped

Notice they are not exactly centered into the box, little seperation helps some.

But I dont like the "sharp" edges along the middle.  To fix this, i combined each of these (2) layers to form 2 new layers.
Then I added a "MASK" to each of these layers.

This allows you to "draw" over the images and mask out or keep areas.  I set a rather large brush with 100% hardness to allow the image to "feather" out.

Then I paint around the sharp edges to smooth them out.

See the BEFORE and AFTER below:

BEFORE MASK AFTER MASKAFTER MASK

Look close at the center parts.

Turn off the layers above to play with the left/right items.

To add some more layers to this, rotated and moved around:

twirl-4-vertical-1

Mirrored

twirl-4-vertical-2

Turning on the origional layers

twirl-5 twirl-6

Decided I wanted another "Style" of twirl, went back to the same image, did a little different twirl on that. (more rotation mainly)

Rotation-1

For this one I wanted to make this more of a STAR so I added duplicate layers then rotated those see the series below:

Rotation-2 Rotation-3 Rotation-4

Wanted these to be the corners of the image.  

Rotation-second-3

Combining these all together:

All-twirls-combined

I like to add some additional steps here.  First i duplicate this layer and take it into Topaz Labs "GLOW 2" and add a little "Fur and Feathers Glow" - This adds some defination to the lines. (or anyway I like it)

Topaz-Glow-FurFeathers

I have been adding some more things to my images.. I have some "glitter" brushes (not 100% sure where I got them, search google, there are ton out there for free).

This shows just the glitter items, mainly these little stars with some trails.  Every few items are on a new layer, this shows all layers combined.

glitter-flares

And here is the Final combine image:

FINAL TWIRLFINAL TWIRL (C) 2020 RomanDA Photography

If you enjoyed this, please comment below, or visit my FB page: RomanDA Photography