Photoshop question?

[cyrax037]

Ok, so I'm wanting to do a tutorial on my original FX video, the dusting effect from Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
I've gotten a few requests, and a friend of mine wants to get into VFX alittle bit, but is almost as broke as I am so I wanted to do a tutorial on how I usrally do my FX with almost nothing but free programs.

Anyway, one of my photo editing software, has this effect called Splash(its arcsoft photostudio 4.0 btw) and its what I often use for particle like effects(Since I've been rotoscoping my stuff by slitting the video into individual Jpeg frames with LSmaker)
http://img514.imageshack.us/img514/8837/splasho.th.jpg (http://img514.imageshack.us/i/splasho.jpg/)

but its the only program I've seen that does this. Does anyone know a way to achieve this with photoshop, or any free program? Photoshop is really common, that's why I'd like to find a way to do this in photoshop if at all possible. My arcsoft program, is also broken somehow, when I click to use anything on the tools, it crashes, and I've uninstalled it and reinstalled it from the disk many times and it doesn't help, so I kinda need a new way to get the splash effect LOL.

[rrh]

I had thought there was a "scatter pixels" filter that looked like that, but I couldn't find it.

I found a "diffuse" filter but you'll need to apply it multiple times

Another approach would be to generate an image from the noise filter and then use that as a displacement map.

[cyrax037]

Thanks, I'll try those out. I've never worked with the displacement maps, how would I go about that?