A little while ago I started to tackle the space technique that BFS posted and I believe I've unlocked the secret the he's been trying to recall. After fiddling with layers, cloud filters and color options it was just a simple matter of trial and error until arriving at the final desired result.
At 9/3/08 02:30 PM, BlueFlameSkulls wrote:
Er I got this one which is my current desktop. I still haven't finished it but I doubt I'll ever finish it as I started it when Doctor Who finished. There was an episode where they got a number of planets together and I thought I;d do something similar. This is obviously resized and you can't see the stars.
I was in the process of making a better nebula than the one in the background.
As you stated, the pics you've made thus far are for desktop wallpapers, therefore when resized they lose the fine intricacies such as the stars. I managed to get around this little barrier by simply starting with a document that is more compatible with the NG dimensions. This is only for the purposes of posting an example here, so if anyone else attempts this keep in mind that you can create your picture to a much larger scale to increase and preserve the quality if you don't plan on posting it here.
Most of this is created from scavenging from tutorials and then doing my own thing. The nebula was a fluke, it was made from a difference cloud filter. Looking at the PSD of this I remember making multiple layers for the planets then having to flatten them into one layer. So trying to recreate that might need to researching.
The nebulae turned out to be the easiest part in a way. A couple of layers, a few filters and some colorization was all it took, but in order to get them just right I tried using layer masks. This worked to an extent, but I still wasn't happy with the result, so I used a much easier trick to get them perfect which I will explain later.
At 9/3/08 05:26 PM, BananaBreadMuffin wrote:
BFS, i'd lower the brightness, up the contrast, reduce the colour range, and just have one part of the backdrop coloured.
I found that a very crucial part of the process was adjusting the lighting and contrast levels on several occasions. My initial attempt came out a little bright, but with space scenes customarily being very dark it just didn't feel natural to have such vivid colors. I had to go back and tweak the process slightly and give it an extra step that complicates things a little, but is worth the extra effort.
So without further adieu, here's my method for creating a space scene with Photoshop.
This one is of moderate difficulty compared to the last few tutorials, but still easy enough.
Photoshop Tutorial: Space - nebula and stars
(for Ps CS3 Extended)
Open a new document and set the dimensions to 700x525 pixels, 72pix/in. This is a good size pallet to work with for starters.
If you wish to post it here on NG and want to preserve the quality, set the dimensions to 599x450 pixels. If you are planning on making it bigger for a wallpaper, go higher to 1024x768, a nice standard size for desktop backgrounds.
STEP 1: Depending on how many colors you want in your nebula clouds, make a new layer for each color, excluding the background. If you want 2 different colors for the nebulae, you should have 2 layers and a background making 3 layers total. If you want 3 colors of nebula, that will make 4 layers including the background, etc.
Right click the background in the workspace and press "layer from background" to make it a layer that's unlocked so it will be easier to work with. Take the paint bucket and fill the background layer with black.
*To organize this a little better, and to make theses directions easier to follow, you should change the name of each layer. Right click each layer and hit "layer properties." Change the bottom layer that is solid black to something like "stars" and each layer above it to "nebula (#)" or "cloud (#)"
STEP 2: At the bottom of the tool bar, set the background color icon to black.
On a nebula layer above the stars layer, set the foreground color to one of the colors you desire for the nebula.
Go to Filter > Render > Clouds. You should now have clouds of your selected color with just a little black showing through in the background. You can press Ctrl+F several more times to add the filter again and again until you get a good amount of black showing through.
STEP 3: Go to Filter > Render > Difference Clouds to reverse the colors. Now the black should be a majority of the clouds, while the color you selected will be the background.
Repeat steps 2 & 3 for the remaining nebula layers, each time choosing a different foreground color.
Step 4: Set each nebula cloud layer's Blend Mode to "screen." (DO NOT touch the blend mode for the stars layer.) The color of each cloud layer should now be visible and blended.
Step 5: Click the stars layer. Go to Filter > Noise > Add Noise. Click the "gaussian" button and the "monochromatic" button. Set the noise level to somewhere between 9% and 12% so that you now have a nice star filled sky and click OK.
Now go to Image > Adjustments > Brightness & Contrast and move the contrast level all the way to 100. Now you have a beautiful set of stars that are not too dim and not too bright of varying sizes and luminosity.
Step 6: At this point you've got a very nice looking space motif, but there may still be too many nebula clouds for it to look real.
I tried using layer masks to fix this problem, but I found them to be a pain to get just right for this kind of project, not to mention if you are not that familiar with using layer masks it's a bit more complicated to do, so here's my solution:
Click each cloud layer and with the Move tool, resize each layer to spread out the nebula clouds and reveal more of that lovely starry sky in the background. Then you can also take the Eraser tool, right click to set it to a decent size with 0% hardness and on each cloud layer remove some of the nebulae and give them a thinner, streakier look rather than cloudy and robust.
If you are not happy with the results and want to try again, you can always go to Edit > Step Backwards, or just expand the Step History at the top left corner of the workspace and go back to a step that will restore the image to before you changed anything.
Step 7 (optional): Now that the nebula clouds are nice and evenly distributed, you can press Ctrl+L to adjust the lighting levels and darken/brighten the clouds to the desired effect. You can also press Ctrl+U to change the cloud colors and mix-and-match colors until you're happy.
Finally, after tweaking and pruning here and there you should have a basic space background you can do a multitude of things with. Before you flatten the layers, try adding some extra "stars" with
Filter > Render > Lens Flare. Add some different lens flares in random places, adjusting their brightness to give the effect of stars at different distances. Once you flatten all the layers you can continue add lens flares so that they will be "on top" of the nebula clouds.
You can make a whole scene by searching through Google or Yahoo! images for different elements such as planets, moons, space ships, galaxies, comets, asteroids, anything space related. Just remember that depending on where you put some of the lens flares and how bright you made them, you may want to adjust the lighting and add shadows to your pasted objects before finalizing the image. Keep in mind the view aspect as well when creating a space scene, sharpen and blur things to draw the eyes to or away from objects depending on the focal point.
Here's a little example I whipped up using this process. The quality isn't phenomenal due to a slight resizing, but it will give you a basic idea of what it can achieve. I purposely made the foreground objects a bit blurry to give it more 3-dimensionality and draw the focal point more towards the planet in the center of the pic. I used some vivid colors just to illustrate the various layers of nebula clouds involved.
