Only a few more minutes right now.
Mark, we should go through your tutorials and try to find some more outdated references and things. After all, you don't have nearly enough to do already. :snicker:
I want to point out an important concept/idea in Mark's BG FX tutorial. In there, he uses Wave on one layer, then immediately on another layer. This makes the Wave on the two different layers match each other. I call it "Filter on Layers in Tandem". I've used this idea many times.
Kudos to Mark for identifying and exploiting that trick.
Here is another example of using that trick.
Let's say you have a photo and you are going to use an Artistic filter on it. On top of that, you want a border to match Artistic filter.
1. Photo all ready to go.
2. New Alpha channel.
3. Make a big white square in the Alpha to act as a starting point for the mask
4. Gaussian Blur the white square
5. Go back to the photo and run your Artistic filter
6. Go back to G-Blurred Alpha chann and run the same filter (ctrl + f)
7. Apply it as a Layer Mask to the Artistified photo
If all went well, you should end up with a photo that looks like a painting of some sort with cool Layer Mask. It should look like the border was also painted on in a manner consistant with the colours and what-not in the photo.
It's always a good thing to see beyond the written tutorial. Find the ideas themselves and use them.
edit: Actually, that's a bit of a very crappy example, but don't let that stop you from experimenting. Add this to my Great Big List of Things to Babble About.
Background FX Tutorial 
Linear Mode
