Banner backgrounds >_< - Help

How can I pull off this kind of stuff?






The website is listed on the cool sites section, but I would like to know how to do the cool effects on the background.

er........what effects? Be more specific, plz. If you're talking about mashing tens of images into each other, search the forum for "blending two images" or something like that.

I mean the blueish thingy on top, just above the navigation bar....

It looks gorgeous, I know there's a lot of work with layers and effects and merging options, I just, can, get anything like that done

I'm more or less self taught.... I'm ok with the web stuff, except with that kind of effects... and they look really proffesional, which would come in handy

So that's it, how the hell do I do those flash things on the banner?

You will need some good photos. Good stock photo websites are a key. You can't make a crappy picture look like gold in photoshop no matter how hard you try.

Then use a lot of motion blur, gaussian blur, and layer masks and you will get similar results.

Some random text placement would help as well.