Ok, this is a weird little effect that I stumbled on accidentally... You're gonna need adobe photoshop 4.0 +, and eye candy for this. Lets rock...
Let's start with a medium sized image, 300x220 sounds nice. Fill the background in with black. On your palette, set your foreground color to a non-grayscale color (I used yellow). Now pick out a font (a heavy one, so the effect shows up better), and put a word down on a new layer. I used my name :-)
So far so good, eh? Select the layer with the text on it. Now, go to the Layer/Type menu and hit "render layer"(5.0 and above). Now make sure that "preserve transparency" is checked or else it will draw the effects everywhere. Now go to Filter/Render/Clouds. Then hit Filter/Render/DifferenceClouds. Then go to Filter/EyeCandy/Antimatter. Your image should look something like this:
Now the rest of this is all freestyle, and it's difficult to go wrong. Just continue doing the cycle of Render/DifferenceClouds and then EyeCandy/Anrimatter. Just do that over and over again and you will end up with some funky stuff. And every few cycles of this, change the 2 palette colors so that when the color differences are subtracted, it changes it around a bit more.... You will see what I mean when you do this. Here's what I got after switching colors 3 times and doing about 7 cycles:
Now the rest of this
is optional... just some little extras. Do this if you want, you might
learn something :-)
Do the same set of effects to the background layer with completely
different palette colors so that the background will contrast the
text. You'll end up with something along these lines:
That's great... but I want the words to be defined a little more. Go to the text layer and then go to Layer/Effects/OuterGlow. Set it like this:
...and we should get something like this:
And there we have it, the "weird acid" effect
by FME. Thanks for joining me. (damn
this is a really cool effect isn't it.)
A few extra tips: