Make a cool, flare-plasma effect using liquify and brushing,

First off we’re going to require a document. Make a new one, about 1000px by 900px. Fill the background with a nice black (#000). Grab the brush tool and right click anywhere on the background. Click on the tiny arrow beside the size of the brush and select “Thick Heavy Brushes”. Change your foreground to #e34412 and brush the following on a new layer



Then on the same layer brush the following in #e11247:



Then Duplicate this layer 3 times and rename each layer to “Brush 1″, “Brush 2″ and “Brush 3″ respectively. Brush 1 should be at the bottom of the layer palette and Brush 3 should be at the top, with Brush 2 lingering in the middle. Set brush 2’s blending mode to Linear Dodge and Brush 3 to Screen.



Step 2 Filtering

Give all 3 brush layers a radial blur by going to Filter » Blur » Radial Blur, and give them these settings:



Finally, go to Filter » Blur » Gaussian Blur and set amount to 13.9. You should end up with something like this:



Now what you want to do is merge these three layers by selecting them all, right clicking and selecting Merge Layers.
Step 3 Liquefying and Blending

Go to Filter » Liquify. Theres no easy way of doing this. What you want to do though is try and make a cool looking plasma-ised effect. Do this by pushing the blurred brush ito itself to make the outside of it straight, as I have done below.



There are many variations you can get by doing this. I messed about a bit and finally got something I liked:



Rename this layer to Plasma 1. Duplicate this layer and set blending mode to Color Dodge and rename this layer to Plasma 2.



Finally, duplicate Plasma 1, place it on top of all the other layers and rotate it slightly like below and rename the layer to Plasma 3:



Set the blending mode on plasma 3 to Luminosity. Hold ctrl (or command) and click on the thumbnail of Plasma 1, then hold ctrl (or command) + shift and click on the thumbnail of Plasma 2. Then add a layer mask to Plasma 3 bu clicking on the third button from the left at the bottom of the layers palette.



Duplicate Plasma 3. Set blending mode to Dissolve. Then make a new layer and merge the dissolved Plasma 3 with it. Then go to Filter » Blur. Set blending mode to Linear Dodge (add) and there you have it. A nice plasma-flare effect.