Quote: "http://www.oferz.com/Tutorials/BloomEffect/BloomEffect.html Shows how it's done using photoshop. The effect is acheived using a Gaussian blur and then the original image blended over it to keep the sharpness."
I must say that is one of the most awful bloom effect I have ever seen.
Bloom should make the brither parts of a image brighter, while the dark parts stay dark. This will be only succesfull with shaders!
Blurring the screen and multiple the first layer, will simply not do the trick. Evolved and Bond1 has made a brilliant shader simulating reallife bloom (when you turn quickly your eyes from dark to bright). Now what you want to is learn fx, your friends have probable PS1...