#reaction diffusion pattern

UPDATES (i'm hoping these'll show up whenever you open the readmore?)

it's possible to do something similar in krita using this plugin, made by the love @arcaedex

it's also possible to do this in photopea, a free browser alternative to photoshop! the results are pretty much identical.

FIRST off you wanna get or make a black and white image of some kind. it has to be one layer. can be noise, a photo, a bunch of lines, whatever. here's mine, just some quick airbrush lines:

now find the actions tab. idk what it looks like in newer versions of photoshop but you probably won't need to dig!

hit the little page thingy to make a new pattern. once you hit 'record', it'll record everything you do. the little square 'stop' icon will end it.

now you want to do a high pass filter. you can mess around with the radius to change the size of your squiggles, but the tutorial had it set to 6. experiment!

now add the 'threshold' adjustment layer. i use the adjustments tab but i think there's also a dropdown menu somewhere. keep it at the default, 128. merge it down. (control or command + E or you can right click it like some kind of weirdo)

and finally, the gaussian blur! the radius of this affects the shape and size of your squiggles as well. i like to keep it around 4.5 but you can mess around with that too.

after that, hit 'stop' on the action you're recording, and then repeat it a bunch of times using the 'play' button, until you have something you like, like this:

WOW!! that was fun!! and only a little tedious thanks to the power of macros. anyway, here's some fun layer blending stuff i like to do. it's with a different pattern cause i made this bit first.

anyway, using a black and white gradient (or a grey base that you do black and white airbrush on), make a layer with the vivid light. this will make the blobs look thicker or thinner.

then, for cool colors, do a gradient map adjustment layer over that:

and finally, my best friend, the overlay layer. just using a gradient here bc i'm lazy, but feel free to experiment with brushes, colors, and blending modes!

NOW GO. MAKE COOL SHIT WITH THE POWER OF MATH. AND SEND IT TO ME

also these are not hard and fast rules PLEASE mess around with them to see what kind of weird shit you can make. here's a gif. as you can see i added some random airblush blobs in the middle of it, for fun.