Saufnase's Tutorial on creating fancy streaks in Photoshop All the pictures POP to full size.
Alright, lets get started. Create a blueish background. Create an empty layer. Select the Brush tool. Size 65, very soft, opacity 25%, somewhat light blue color and paint something like this:
Take the same brush at size 25 and paint some more and at size 9 so your streaky painting looks kinda like this.
Now, take the eraser at size 1 and 50% opacity and erase a bit in there so it kinda looks like this:
There you have it. Very fancy streaks.
Just kidding. ... lets move on.
Zoom in on your streaky painting and select just one pixel high a whole row.
Inverse selection and delete. So you are left with this.
Now, take this layer and scale it up to almost picture size. It should look like this now and I guess you can see now where this is going .
Put any streakyless ocean picture behind it ...
Change the layer blend mode from "Normal" to "Vivid Light ...
Distort the Layer so it matches your picture ...
Adjust Layer opacity and erase a bit with a size 100, opacity 25% eraser in areas where it looks unnatural.
