Locked lesson.
About this lesson
Make stars and planets to design your own Solar System in the Cosmos.
Exercise files
Download the Photoshop file used in the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.
Create a Space Scene.psd11.1 MB
Quick reference
Topic: Create a Space Scene
Create your own Solar System and Planets.
When to use
Make stars and planets to design your own Solar System in the Cosmos.
Instructions
Make the Background stars with a custom brush
- Select the Brush Tool (B).
Open the brush settings: Menu/Window/Brush (F5),
Brush Tip Shape Section: Set size to 3 pixels, spacing: 260%,
Shape Dynamics: Size Jitter 100%,
Scattering: turn on Both Axis, Scattering at 1000%, count 1,
Transfer: Opacity and Flow Fitter to 100%. - Brush randomly to create start field.
Make a Large Planet
- Select the ‘Ellipse Tool’.
- Zoom out and draw a large circle that is only partly visible in the document.
- Change color to black.
Layer Styles:
Inner Glow: Blend mode: Linear Dodge, Opacity: 75%, Size: 20, color: 62e7ff, Range: 60%,
Outer Glow: Blend mode: Linear Dodge, Opacity: 75%, Size: 10, color: 59b3ff, Range: 60%,
Inner Shadow: Blend mode: Linear Dodge, Opacity: 75%, Global light: Off,
Size: 70, Angle: 90, Distance: 10, color: 3599ff.
Add a texture to the Large Planet
- Load texture and drag on top of planet.
- With the control key held down click on the planet layer’s thumbnail.
- Menu/Filter/Distort/Spherize. Set amount to 100%.
- Click add layer mask in layers panel.
- Change blend mode of texture to overlay, opacity to 70%.
Bounce some light off the Planet
- Command or control selection thumbnail.
- Brush tool: Soft large and round, Color: aed0ff.
- Paint a spot on top of the planet shape.
- Duplicate the planet Layer and clear its layer styles.
- Outer Glow: Blend mode: Linear Dodge, Opacity: 100%, Size: 155, color: 419aff, Range: 60%.
- Command or Control + ‘T’, hold the Alt or Option key and squeeze inwards.
Add the Sun
- Create a new layer at the bottom to the planet layers.
- Brush Tool: Soft, white, medium size.
- Paint a sun just appearing at the top of the planet.
Create a light Streak
- New layer above the sun layer.
- Draw in a short horizontal line.
- Go to Menu/Filter/Blur/Motion Blur: Angle-0, Distance-500pxls.
- Move the light streak into position.
Add Some Clouds
- Create a new layer at the bottom to the planet and Sun layers.
- Set Foreground color: 3e78cf.
- Background color: black.
- Go to Menu/Filter/Render/Clouds.
- Add a levels adjustment to the clouds layer and move the midtone slider to 0.7.
- Duplicate this layer and change 2nd layer blend mode to soft light.
- Drop 1st clouds layer to 25%.
Create a moon
- Using the ‘Ellipse Tool’, draw out a black circle.
- Duplicate layer.
- Copy layer styles from large planet and add to bottom moon layer.
- Bring in new texture and repeat texture process above with top moon layer.
- Group the two moon layers and apply a layer mask.
- Use large soft black brush mask out the dark side of the moon.
- 00:04 Hey, everyone.
- 00:04 For as long as I can remember,
- 00:06 I've been dreaming about what may be out there that we'll never get to see.
- 00:09 Fortunately, we have Photoshop to make our dreams come true.
- 00:13 Creating the basic star field for your scene is actually quite simple.
- 00:16 By creating a custom brush, we can create a nice star field within minutes.
- 00:21 Making sure you're working with a new layer,
- 00:23 grab your brush tool from the tools bar.
- 00:25 Now, to customize our brush, we need to open our brush panel.
- 00:28 If yours is not already open, activate it by going up to the window menu and
- 00:32 then down to brush.
- 00:33 We are looking to create a nice, tiny, scattering brush.
- 00:37 Starting the brush tip shape section, set your brush nice and small.
- 00:41 Around 3 pixels.
- 00:42 And then down under spacing, crank it up to around 260%.
- 00:46 Moving over to shape dynamics, turn the size jitter up to 100%.
- 00:50 This will allow our brush to paint many different sized stars,
- 00:54 once we start brushing.
- 00:56 Next, under scattering turn on both axes and
- 00:59 set the scatter at 1000% with a count of one.
- 01:03 This will move away from a boring, straight line of stars.
- 01:07 And finally, let's turn on transfer.
- 01:09 Turn the opacity and
- 01:10 flow jitter up to 100% to give us stars with different brightnesses.
- 01:15 Our star brush is complete, nice and simple.
- 01:18 If you think you might use this brush later on, you can save it by selecting new
- 01:22 brush pre-set under the drop-down menu at the top right corner of your brush panel.
- 01:27 Now, all you have to do is brush.
- 01:29 Because we use shape dynamics, scattering and transfer to our advantage as we
- 01:34 brush in our canvas, all of the stars are being randomly generated so
- 01:38 there won't be any repetitive patterns going on.
- 01:40 I'm simply brushing in circles to fill up as much or
- 01:43 as little of the document until I get the amount of stars that I'm looking for.
- 01:47 Now keep in mind that we're not looking for an extravagant star field.
- 01:50 We want something basic that won't distract us from the other elements,
- 01:53 which we're about to create.
- 01:55 Let's move on and create our large planet.
- 01:57 This part is a little bit tricky, so make sure to follow along closely.
- 02:01 Go ahead and
- 02:01 grab your ellipse tool from the tools bar, and we want to draw out a massive circle.
- 02:07 You might wanna zoom out a little bit so you have enough room to place this circle.
- 02:10 You want to end up with only a portion of it poking out from the bottom of
- 02:13 your canvas.
- 02:15 Once it's in place, change the color of the shape to black by double clicking on
- 02:18 the color box in the Layers panel, and choosing up here black.
- 02:22 Now we need to add a few layer styles.
- 02:24 Let's start with an inner glow.
- 02:27 Start by setting the blend mode to this glow to linear dodge, and then for
- 02:31 the color, use a nice baby blue.
- 02:33 I'm gonna use C2, E7, FF.
- 02:38 Down below. change the size to 20 and
- 02:40 then the range to 60.
- 02:43 Next will be an outer glow.
- 02:44 Once again, set the blend mode to linear dodge, and
- 02:48 the color's gonna be a slightly darker blue 59B3FF.
- 02:51 Now, set the size at ten.
- 02:57 And, finally, an inner shadow, blend mode again,
- 03:00 is linear dodge and the color will be 3599ff.
- 03:03 Go ahead and turn off global light and set the angle at 90 degrees.
- 03:10 The distance at 10 and the size at 70.
- 03:15 Now that the layer styles are complete we need to bring in a texture.
- 03:18 Doing a search for planet texture on deviantART you'll find many textures which
- 03:22 you can use for your personal projects, like this one here.
- 03:25 When you have your texture open in Photoshop, drag it onto your document and
- 03:29 place it on top of your planet.
- 03:31 At the moment, the texture is too flat.
- 03:33 In order to create a curved illusion,
- 03:35 we're going to apply a filter to the texture.
- 03:38 But before we do that, we need to define our sphere.
- 03:41 With your command or control key held down,
- 03:43 click on your planet layers thumbnail to turn it into a selection.
- 03:47 When the planet is selected, head up to the filter menu, down to distort, and
- 03:51 then spherize.
- 03:53 Make sure your mount is set to 100% and press ok.
- 03:56 Your texture should have a spherical look to it inside the selected area.
- 04:00 With the selection still active, add a layer mass to the texture by clicking on
- 04:04 the add layer mass button at the bottom of your layers panel.
- 04:07 This will hide everything outside of the selection leaving you
- 04:10 only the rounded area.
- 04:12 That looks good, but it's not very convincing.
- 04:14 There are a few things we can do to help drive this effect home.
- 04:17 First, in your Layers panel,
- 04:19 change the blend mode of the texture layer to Overlay, with an Opacity of 70%.
- 04:24 Now if you're happy with just the edge of the planet visible,
- 04:27 you can skip this next step.
- 04:29 We're gonna add a little bit more visibility to the middle of the planet.
- 04:32 Right above your planet layer, add another new layer, when that new layer is added,
- 04:37 turn your planet into a selection once again, by command or control clicking on
- 04:40 it's thumbnail, grab your brush tool and select a nice large, soft brush.
- 04:45 Set the color of this brush to a nice baby blue, A,E,D,O,F,F.
- 04:51 Now add a spot towards the top of your planet.
- 04:54 This will interact with your textures' overlay blend mode to
- 04:56 reveal that new area.
- 04:58 It's getting there, but it needs more glow.
- 05:01 In your layers panel, make a duplicate of the planet layer and then clear its layer
- 05:05 style by right clicking the duplicated layer and choosing clear layer styles.
- 05:10 When the layer is all clear, we want to add a simple outer glow.
- 05:14 Linear dodge for the blend mode, 100% for the opacity.
- 05:18 The color will be set to 419aff.
- 05:21 The size 155, and the range 60.
- 05:28 Once the glow is in place enter free transform mode and
- 05:31 horizontally squeeze the planet inwards.
- 05:33 This will taper the glow leaving the middle slightly thicker,
- 05:37 make sure to hold your alt or
- 05:38 option key while dragging either side to transform it from the center.
- 05:42 Two more glows to go, hang in there.
- 05:44 Go ahead and create a new layer below all the planet layers.
- 05:47 With a soft brush around 200 pixel or so, add a white spot at the top of the planet.
- 05:53 As long as you place this new layer below the planets,
- 05:56 their layer style should compliment this new sport quite well.
- 05:59 Now to finish up this glow, on another new layer,
- 06:02 use a soft 7 pixel brush to create a single horizontal line,
- 06:07 which should be only slightly longer than the spot that we just created.
- 06:10 Once that line is created, we need to taper the edges.
- 06:13 Head up to the Filter menu, down to Blur, and then choose Motion Blur.
- 06:16 When the Motion Blur window comes up, set the angle at zero and
- 06:20 the distance at 500 pixels.
- 06:23 Once the blur is applied,
- 06:24 place the new light streak into place to finish the glow.
- 06:27 Our scene is coming along well.
- 06:29 However, the pitch black star field could use some variation.
- 06:32 Let's create some clouds.
- 06:34 In your Layers panel, create another new layer right above your stars layer.
- 06:38 On this layer,
- 06:38 we're going to use the Clouds filter, but first we need to set some color.
- 06:42 For the foreground color, we're gonna use a medium blue, 3e78CF.
- 06:49 And for the background color, it's gonna be pitch black.
- 06:52 When your colors are set, add your clouds filter by going up to the Filter menu,
- 06:55 down to Render, and then choose Clouds.
- 06:58 Now in order for our scene to not get overwhelmed by blue clouds,
- 07:01 we wanna pull in some additional dark tones.
- 07:04 To accomplish this, add a levels adjustment to your clouds layer and
- 07:08 pull the mid-tone slider slightly to the right, around 0.7.
- 07:12 At this point, we have one clouds layer, but we want two.
- 07:15 One to interact with the stars and one to act as clouds.
- 07:19 Inter layers panel duplicate your current clouds layer so
- 07:22 you're left with two identical layers.
- 07:24 Now in the bottom layer, change your blend mode to soft light.
- 07:28 On the top layer, keep the blend mode at normal, but
- 07:30 drop the opacity to 25 percent.
- 07:33 Things are looking good, but the scene is still a little bit bland.
- 07:36 Let's add one more additional planet.
- 07:39 Go ahead once again and grab your Ellipse tool from the Tools bar and
- 07:42 draw out a black circle at the top right corner of your document.
- 07:46 When that circle's created, make a duplicate of that layer.
- 07:49 You should now have two identical dark circles.
- 07:52 On the top circle, we're going to use the same layer styles that we used for
- 07:55 large planet.
- 07:56 In your Layers panel,
- 07:58 right click on the large planet's layer, choose Copy Layers Style,
- 08:01 and then right click on the new circle, and paste the Layers Style.
- 08:05 Now just like we did for the large planet, we need to give this planet texture.
- 08:09 I'm gonna use this texture which I also found on deviantART.
- 08:12 Bring this texture into your document and place it on top of your small planet.
- 08:16 Now we wanna follow the same steps we did with with the large planet.
- 08:20 First, turn your circle into a selection and then head up to the filter menu,
- 08:24 down to distort, spherize with a value of 100%.
- 08:29 Apply a layer mask to hide the leftover bits, and
- 08:32 then change the blend mode of the texture layer to Overlay.
- 08:36 Now, we need to mask the top right side of the planet in
- 08:39 order to give an eclipse effect.
- 08:41 In your Layers panel select both the texture layer and the top circle.
- 08:45 You can do this by selecting one of the two layers, and then with your Cmd or
- 08:49 Ctrl key held down, click on a blank area of the second layer.
- 08:53 Once both layers are selected, we need to place them in a group.
- 08:56 At the bottom of your Layers panel,
- 08:58 with your Shift key held down, click on the Create New Group icon.
- 09:02 This will place the selected layers inside a new group.
- 09:05 Once they're grouped, apply a layer mask to that group.
- 09:08 Now with a soft black brush, around 400 pixels or
- 09:11 so, click a few times at the top right corner of the small planet.
- 09:15 This will hide the texture and
- 09:16 the layer styles revealing the second black circle below.
- 09:20 With the same method you can create as many planets as you like to fill up
- 09:23 the remaining areas.
Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.