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Subject: 
Easy starfield, planet and star recipe
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.space, lugnet.publish.photography
Date: 
Thu, 19 Sep 2002 08:10:11 GMT
Viewed: 
2245 times
  
Greetings! Here's a simple starfield recipe for Photoshop:
- Make a new document, 720 X 480 pixels, 300 dpi, Mode: Grayscale
- Go to your Tool Palette and grab your Paint Bucket tool and fill the
canvas with black
- Go to Filter, then Texture, then Grain
- Set Intensity to 90 and Contrast between 80 and 90 and choose Grain Type:
Soft and click OK
- Go to Image, then Mode, then RGB color to convert it back to a color image
(though it will still appear grayscale)

That's the fastest and easiest way I know to make a starfield with Photoshop.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here's a relatively easy way to make a planet:
- Working from the starfield you just made, create a new layer for the
planet (Shift+Ctrl+N or go up to Layer, then New, then Layer again and click
OK or hit Enter)
- Next go to your Tool Palette and grab your Elliptical Marquee tool
- Create a fairly good sized circular selection slightly right of the center
of the starfield by holding down shift and clicking and dragging your mouse
(holding shift results in a perfect circle). Note: Release your mouse button
first, then release shift
- Go to your Tool Palette again and right click on the Paint Bucket to
select the Gradient Fill tool instead
- Move down along your Tool Palette and select your foreground color. Make
sure black is your background color and pick a second color for your
planet(lets say blue)
- Next go up to the gradient styles and select Radial Gradient
- Move your cursor near top left edge of your circlular selection (about 10
o'clock on a watch face) and click and drag diagonally to just past the
center of your circle. This should create a nice, 3-D looking sphere that's
about half black and half blue
- Next go to Filter, then Distort, then Ocean Ripple and set the both the
Ripple Size and Ripple Magnitude to 5 and click OK
- Finally, to add an outer glow to the planet, go to Layer, then Layer
Style, then Outer Glow. My default color is yellow so first thing I do is
change the color to match my planet, in this case blue. The other settings
should be:
     Blend Mode: Normal
     Opacity: 50%
     Technique: Softer
     Spread: 15%
     Size: 20px
     Range: 70%
And then click OK. That should get you a gaseous giant type planet. Hit
Ctrl+D to deselect the planet.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

- To add a star to this picture, first select your Background layer (the
original starfield)
- Go to Filter, then Render, then Lens Flare. The Brightness setting should
be 60% and the flare center should be slightly to the left and above the
center of the picture in the preview pane (so that the flare sits about an
inch away from your planet, at roughly the same 10 o'clock angle). Lens Type
should be 105mm Prime, and click OK. The end result should look somewhat
like this:

http://www.geekshelf.com/gallery/danjassim/MoreArtwork/easy.jpg

Good luck!

Dan



Message has 2 Replies:
  Re: Easy starfield, planet and star recipe
 
In lugnet.space, Daniel Jassim writes: ... (...) . . . (...) looks wrong. The lit spot is too small, unless the star is tiny, and practically on top of the planet. Perhaps you need to drag the gradient circle just a bit further if you start at the (...) (22 years ago, 19-Sep-02, to lugnet.space, lugnet.publish.photography)
  Re: Easy starfield, planet and star recipe
 
(...) etc. In the past, to make those sorts of things, Ive used the 'render clouds', then distorted the image in various ways. Of course that always entails ugly amounts of work since the cloud rendering always has that same sparse fractal dimension (...) (22 years ago, 20-Sep-02, to lugnet.space, lugnet.publish.photography)

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