Photoshop tutorial: Creating a planet | lynda.com

In this movie what we are going to do is we are going to put a distant planet right here.

Because we are on a moon of this planet. It's going to be about half the size of our existing

file, so when we look at the file here we see that it's 32 inches high. So what we are

going to do is create a new file, and we'll make it a little smaller, let's say we'll

make it 72 just like what we are working at 72, and we'll set this up to Inches, and we

are going to make it 24 Inches high, and we'll make it 24 Inches square, there we go, and

we'll click OK. So here is our new file where we are going to create our planet. So what

I'm going to do is I'm going to get my Elliptical Marquee tool and right from the center here

I'm going to hold my Option and Shift keys--Option will help me draw from the center out and

the Shift will constrain it to a perfect circle--and I create this big circle about like that.

That's going to be my planet. I'm going to create a new layer, right here, and I'm going

to just fill it with, it doesn't matter just fill it with black because that's not going

to be the color. But to use the next filter, which is what I'm going to use to create the

planet, I do need to have something inside that space. So now I'm going to and pick the

colors for my planet. So I'm going to go in here, and we're going to pick this kind of

an orangey color right here, nice light kind of beige color there like that okay. And then

for the background we are going to go with that family but go really dark like say this

guy down here, click OK. So we'll keep it as a similar color scheme to our actual moon

back here. So now that we have that in that planet, or that selection, I'm going to add

a filter, and it's Render > Fibers, and there's Fibers. Now I can play around with the Variance

to get all kinds of different details and such, but I'm just going to go with a little

Variance I start getting these nice little tones like that, and I'm going to click OK,

and I'm going to get that texture right there. Now that I have that texture, that's going

to work for me, I'm going to start to give it that roundness by giving it another Filter

here, under Distort we have Spherize, which I'm going to go in there, set to 100% I'm

going to go ahead and say do it. And then I'm going to apply it again, so I'm going

to apply it a few times until it starts to have that really round kind of sense of the

planet that I'm trying to create. One more time should do it, maybe one more just for

fun, there, now we have this planet. It starts to have a feeling of something like Jupiter

or something, we might even want to throw a couple of storms in there but we'll do that

in another of our dreamscapes later. But there we see that we have this nice kind of a texture

for our planet. And you know, just for the fun of it, I'm going to go in here, and I'm

going to get a Lasso, and I'm going to select a little Feather for it, I am going to do

a Feather of 20. Now this is set to Pixels. So 20 is quite high because we are working

at 72 dpi, if we were working at a 300 dpi, 20 isn't that match. So keep that in mind

when you are setting some of these things that are set to Pixels. So I'm going to go

in here, and I'm just going to select a little area right in here, like so, just like that,

and I'm going to go to another filter, which I have a filter down here which is called

Liquify. And Liquify, what I'm going to do is I'm going to do some weird stuff to this.

I'm going to make my brush a little bigger and right in there I'm going to do something

like little twisting just to twist this around like that just to start forming a little storm

kind of a thing happening in that area right there just to add a little more variety to

our little planet just like that just a little distortion, click OK, and there we see that

we have this little distortion happening to our planet, that's the portion that we are

going to see right in there. Now, I'm going to take this and rotate it so that our planet

is going to be kind of shaped like that. Well, maybe we'll even turn it this way, yeah that

looks good, see we could do anything we want until we have exactly what we would like it

to look like, and there is about the shape that we are going to have. In the next movie

what we are going to do is we are going to add some rings to this planet.