sarah_jones asked me how i make my wallpapers and i thought i could as well share the tips with everyone. This tutorial is basically to make wallpapers with black backgrounds, as its the only style that i've been working on lately.

What do you need?
- A picture with black background or if you have psd's with no background its much better.
- Photoshop (mine is in spanish but its pretty much the same, i will tell you the instructions in english)
- Textures like this one (mostly black with some effects -the effects can be in color-).

Here we go!

Instructions

1. First you need to open the image you want to make the wallpaper of. Im using this eleven/rose manip:



Click on the images to enlarge.

2. Now open a new file with the wallpaper size you are going to make and drag the image there. I'll work with 1280x800px. Just like this:



3. Now open your texture and drag it above the image, if the texture is smaller resize it. Im using this one.



Note that some textures look bad when you resize them so make sure you choose another one if that happens, the idea is that the whole wallpaper looks like its one piece and thats the effect we want to achieve.

4. Now, set your texture layer to Lighten Mode. You'll have something like this:



5. That's it. Now you can drag your image into the position you think looks better (or play with it resizing it, duplicating it, etc).

Optional

6. You can add a gradient map if you dont want your wallpaper to look so black&white. 



7.  Set the opacity of the gradient map layer to 12% more or less depending on the amount of color you want.



Final product



I hope this helps, i tried to make it as clear as possible.

And remember to just keep playing with photoshop, it wont bite i promise ;)!