Get your photoshop document from tutorial1 ready, we're about to get into digital effect madness now. Now time for the mind-blowing yet very elegant "1 pixel drag away" style. Are you ready for perfection? Lets get this started:
First we need some imagery we can apply the effect on. While some artists strictly go for complex abstracted forms, we decided to use some more reality-based imagery. A good-looking warplane will get the job done for us. After erasing the background around the plane, we copy and paste it into our gradient document. We spent quite some time finding the right size and positioning.
Once you find a good composition of image and gradient in your document you can get ready for the effect. Choose the single column marquee tool (or the single row marquee tool, if you prefer a vertical oriented effect) and select a single pixel column of the image you just pasted into your document.
Now select the move tool and then choose the free transform command in the edit menu. Don't worry if this is getting a little confusing, you're almost done. The only thing left to do is drag one side of the free transform bounding box to the documents border. By now you should be able to see the effect visually distorting your image. Looks great, doesn't it? For even more style you can duplicate the image-layer to create an interesting virtual composition.
