Dickie Mills

Ok, after sometime of messing around in photoshop at work, i’ve worked on making this tutorial for creating a nice starfield/planet scene.

1) Firstly let’s create the canvas (with black background);

2) And add some noise: Filter/Noise/Add Noise

3) Next, alter the brightness/contrast: Image/Adjustments/Brightness&Contrast

4) This next step is up to you, but i prefer having the ‘paint daub’ effect, makes the stars look a little more sparse

5) Create a circular marquee on a new layer, any size is fine - then fill it with clouds (Make sure you have Black and White colours (shortcut D)) then fill, Filters/Render/Clouds, this should fill it with a planet-esque texture, but it’s looking a bit too flat.. so go to Filters/Distort/Spherize (push it to 100% and hit ok!)

6) Now we want to colour it, i chose a light blue.. just to give it that cool, water-based planet… or something? i dunno, it looked cool. Make sure to desaturate it a fair bit, you can follow the values i’ve set if you want (Hue=209, Saturation=16, Lightness=0) go to Image/Adjustments/Hue&Saturation.

7) Add some eerie glow to the globe. Go to the bottom of the layers window, and on the left hand side there is a small button that looks like an italic f in a black circle, click that.. then click outer glow (by the way, you must have the planet layer selected) use the settings i’ve used, or your own after all we live in a freedom-of-choice world!
Blend Mode: Normal
Opacity: 55%
Noise: 0%
Colour: White

Spread: 0%
Size 24% (this will depend on the size of your planet)

Now create a layer from the ‘Outer Glow’ layer so we can edit the glow and the planet seperately. Do this by right clicking the effects layer and selecting ‘Create Layer’

9) Now select your burn tool (Shortcut O) and proceed to ‘burn’ one side/edge of the planet (make sure your planet layer is selected) I had the tool settings on ‘Highlights’ and ‘100% opacity’

10) Choose the ‘Outer glow’ layer (will probably be called ‘Layer 1’s Outer Glow’) and burn away the same area you did with the planet.. so it should look like it’s being erased.

11) To finish off, I swapped the burn tool for my the dodge tool, and ‘lit up’ the other side of the planet..

Hope this was ok to follow, it’s my first tutorial, and questions please feel free to ask!

Posted on February 15th, 2007 by rich
Filed under: Blog, Misc, Photoshop